The best thing that can be said about Thailand and Malaysia wanting to join BRICS is that it won’t cost them anything. They won’t gain much, either.
The idea of lumping Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa together began as a thought experiment by Goldman Sachs, a way for the bank to parcel its bond portfolio in the advanced developing world. When the idea was taken up by those countries in the late 2000s, it was only as a gentlemen’s club where participants could gather to bemoan why they were apparently dealt such a bad hand by the U.S.-led international order.
Yet, BRICS isn’t a geopolitical club since most members (China and India, for instance) have conflicting interests. If Saudi Arabia joins, it will be seated next to Iran (a new member), its hegemonic rival in the Middle East. This guarantees that nothing of any importance will be discussed at BRICS summits. (How are you going to have a meaningful conversation on energy, for instance, with all these conflicting interests?)
Moreover, Russia, China, and Iran are now staunchly in the same camp of wanting to tear down the Western order. Brazil, India, and South Africa (plus Egypt and the UAE, two new members) are quite content with that order. So, say goodbye to any meaningful conversations about security at BRICS summits.
Economics is the only thing left that the members might actually discuss properly, but BRICS isn’t an economic club either. In an interview with Chinese media last month, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim seemed convinced that BRICS may one day establish a shared currency that might rival the U.S. dollar. He clearly didn’t listen to the BRICS summit last year when almost the first thing the leaders said was that they don’t want a BRICS currency.
There is the BRICS’ New Development Bank, which has ample funds. But you don’t need to be a BRICS member to access them. Bangladesh and Uruguay are members of the development bank but not the bloc. Moreover, joining BRICS wouldn’t give Thailand or Malaysia much say over how the development bank functions since the founding document says the original five members will always have 55 percent of the total voting power, and almost all of the funds are provided by China.
There’s also BRICS’ Contingent Reserve Arrangement, but, at least for now, Malaysia and Thailand are unlikely to experience short-term balance of payments pressures, and if they did, they are already part of other currency swap arrangements. Moreover, if you’re a reformist-minded leader, like Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, joining BRICS isn’t even a way of incentivizing your own bureaucracy to implement much-needed structural reforms since there are no structural conditions on membership, hence why Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, was able to join.
Indonesia took a look at BRICS last year and said, “it’s a no from us.” Argentina said the same after a new president entered office who doesn’t just want to find new means of leeching off others so the country doesn’t have to pay its debts. Saudi Arabia, another country invited to join in 2023, is dragging its feet, well aware that joining might be perceived by the U.S., its security guarantor, as an anti-Western move.
So why do Malaysia and Thailand want to join? There’s probably a good deal of their governments playing up for their local audience. Thitinan Pongsudhirak, someone always worth listening to, argued that this “hasty and misguided move” was intended for domestic consumption, mainly because Srettha has a litany of unfulfilled promises: no progress on joining the OECD; no Schengen visa-free deal; no real progress on a trade deal with the European Union; and major pushback on his government’s “digital wallet” and “Land Bridge” schemes.
“BRICS is thus played to domestic audiences as a deliverable achievement,” Thitinan argued. For Malaysia’s Premier Anwar, it makes some sense politically to appear not to be fully aligned with the West (not least over Gaza) and to have a foot in the same camp where Beijing calls most of the shots.
Indeed, the purpose of joining is to feed into a narrative. It’s apparently about having a louder voice for the “Global South” and within the “Global South.” Thai foreign minister Maris Sangiampongsa spoke about having “a more active role in South-South cooperation.” If you read anything on BRICS, you’ll likely hear something like this: the bloc was created to build a multipolar world order and give a louder voice to the Global South. At the time it was founded, that made some sense. The first summit was in 2009, a moment in time when the Global Financial Crisis was sweeping through the developed world, the U.S. was reeling from failed Middle Eastern wars, and people started taking seriously the cliché about “the West” versus “the Rest.” China hadn’t yet launched its Belt and Road Initiative nor shown the world the true aggressive nature of its rise; Russia was still the world’s friendly oil merchant.
Since then, “The Rest” has mutated into the new buzzword, “the Global South,” a term so malleable it defies definition. However, unlike in the late 2000s, the developed world is now no longer economically sluggish – just look at the U.S. economy – while China is on the precipice of economic collapse on numerous fronts. Russia has shown its true colors. Iran (a member) and Saudi Arabia (a possible member) are locked in a battle for regional supremacy.
Sarang Shidore, director of the Quincy Institute’s Global South Program, argued recently in Foreign Policy that “Southeast Asia’s presence in BRICS strengthens the collective voice on reform of the international system, which Thailand and Malaysia also desire.” The problem with expanding a group like BRICS is that it brings in so many disparate voices that it stops the organization from doing much of anything. Thailand and Malaysia should be now well aware of some of the problems their own region faces because ASEAN doubled in size in the 1990s. Or, when an organization expands, one member steps in, becomes first among equals, and starts dictating policy, which is what Beijing has always wanted from BRICS. But that would make the grouping a mere Chinese vessel. That’s unlikely because BRICS includes members (India and Egypt) who don’t want this to happen.
And, even if BRICS limps along having fewer and fewer meaningful conversations because so many of its members disagree on most things, there’s also the question of what sort of discussions on reforming the international system Malaysia and Thailand would actually want to be part of. Russia wants to enlist as much support (or silence) from developing countries so it can continue its genocidal war in Ukraine – and then potentially onward to Poland and the Baltics. China wants to enlist the support of as many developing countries as possible so it can demand trade concessions from the United States. (China isn’t the articulator of the Global South’s concerns; it wants the Global South to ventriloquize its concerns.) India, a classic non-aligned power, really doesn’t like what China is doing and is investing much less time in BRICS.