Kazan summit and the geometry of the new world

The sixteenth BRICS summit opened in Kazan on 22 October and closed on the 24th, under the chairmanship of a host whose purposes were on display from the first session. Vladimir Putin welcomed the leaders of the expanded grouping to the city on the Volga, and the guest list read like a census of the world’s unease with the Western order: the Chinese president, the Indian prime minister, the presidents of Iran, Egypt, South Africa, the Emirates, and the prime minister of Ethiopia, with the Brazilian president joining by video from a scheduling conflict, and the summit’s theme, ‘strengthening multilateralism for just global development and security’, framed the proceedings that followed. The Kazan Declaration that closed the meeting committed the group to reform of the international financial institutions, to a reduction of dependence on the dollar, to the expansion of the grouping itself, and to the language of a world order in which the global south sets its own terms.

The summit was the first of the expanded BRICS, the nine-member version that took in Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the Emirates at the beginning of the year, and the expansion was the summit’s quiet centrepiece. The grouping that began as an acronym of convenience among four emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China, joined later by South Africa, has become the principal vehicle of the effort to construct an alternative to the institutions that the west built after the war. The meeting in Kazan was the largest gathering of non-Western leaders of the year, and the arithmetic of the attendance, the populations, the resources, the share of the world economy that the members and the applicants together represent, was the summit’s most persuasive argument.

The summit was also, unavoidably, a demonstration for the host. Russia, sanctioned and isolated by the west since the invasion of Ukraine, used the week in Kazan to display the company it keeps, and the display was largely successful: the leaders came, the handshakes were photographed, and the narrative of isolation, so central to the western strategy of the war, was harder to sustain after the week. The summit produced no substantive movement on the war, the peace plan that the participants had hoped to promote was not advanced, and the commitment to the financial alternatives remained, as before, more declarative than operational. The meeting’s value to Moscow was the meeting itself.

The summit’s limits were as visible as its reach. The members disagree on the fundamentals of the new order they invoke: India and China are rivals, the Emirates and Iran are not friends, the reform of the dollar-based system is championed by states whose own currencies and reserves remain tied to it, and the expansion that strengthened the group has also made its decision-making more unwieldy, the consensus harder to reach, the declarations more general. The BRICS is an idea more than an institution, and the summit in Kazan was the idea’s largest staging yet.

The geometry of the new world was, in any case, the week’s real subject. The group that met on the Volga represents the majority of humanity, and the summit’s message, whatever the internal contradictions, was that the majority is no longer content with the arrangements that a minority built. The meeting ended with the promises of further expansion, further summits, further declarations, and with the recognition, shared by the participants and the watchers alike, that the new world being described in Kazan is being built slowly, and that its construction will be the diplomatic story of the years ahead.