The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008 has gone down in history as the symbol of the financial crisis and of the subsequent “great recession”. According to our Marxist analysis, that economic earthquake revealed above all a world power balance transformed by Atlantic decline and Chinese rise. It was a crisis in global relations and, in fact, we can also count the birth of the BRICS among its strategic consequences: the coalition of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa began meeting annually, demanding the reform of the international order to give the emerging powers a bigger say.
G7 and BRICS in the G20
The firstborn son of the global crisis was the “Group of Twenty” (G20) which, as swiftly as November 2008, met for the first time in Washington at the level of heads of State and government. We wrote in our newspaper that this was the birth of a “new balance in power relations: the old metropolises of imperialism, America and Europe, can no longer decide on their own; the global centre of gravity is shifting towards Asia”. New economic powers had expanded the world market, making the historic G7 format inadequate. Since the 1970s, the G7 had held regular meetings of the governments of the seven major industrialised countries: the United States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy. The five BRICS countries and the European Union, as well as Australia, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, found a place in the new G20.
Hence, in those years of crisis, the BRICS participated in promoting the “Group of Twenty” while simultaneously launching their own autonomous initiative, an overt counterweight to the G7, which has never disbanded within the G20 and continues to hold its annual summits. Initially, the BRICS mirrored the G7 as regards its informal model, without a founding treaty, a permanent secretariat, or an official headquarters. However, since the Fortaleza Brazilian summit in 2014, the five countries have begun to institutionalise their cooperation, creating a fund and a development bank — the New Development Bank (NDB) to counterpose and outflank the IMF and the World Bank, the historic pillars of the US-led order.
“BRICS Plus” expansion
Since 2023, with the Johannesburg conference in South Africa, the BRICS has raised the banner of the “Global South”, launching an enlargement process to bring in new member countries, beginning with Africa and the Middle East. The first new members included Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and, most notably, Iran, the United States’ bitter enemy. Saudi Arabia, officially invited to join, has put its decision on hold, remaining on the threshold.
Last summer, at the Kazan summit in Russia, a second and even more extensive expansion, which took concrete form in the first days of this year, was announced. In January, Indonesia officially became the tenth full member of the so-called “BRICS Plus”, while nine “partner States” are now in a new outer circle: Malaysia and Thailand of the ASEAN group, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan from Russia’s historic sphere of influence, plus Nigeria, Uganda, Bolivia, and Cuba. Other countries have been invited to become “partners” pending a decision, including Turkey, Algeria, and Vietnam.
Indonesia is one of the most unexpected and politically important members of this increasingly broad and heterogeneous international coalition. Joko Widodo’s presidency rejected a first approach from the BRICS at Johannesburg: it chose to give priority to the process for joining the OECD club of “rich countries” and to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, the regional initiative abandoned by the USA in Donald Trump’s first term and now led by Japan. In contrast, Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, chose to accept the BRICS proposal immediately after taking office.
Risky ambitions
An editorial in The Jakarta Post shares Prabowo’s ambition to “make Indonesia an influential player at the global level”, but fears he is “playing with fire”, underestimating the “potential pitfalls” of this acceleration, “especially concerning increasing trade and military tensions between China and the United States”. On the eve of his second presidency, Trump “threatened to impose 100% tariffs on BRICS if the group continues its de-dollarisation plan”. Prabowo’s predecessor, Widodo, “was known for his reluctance to join the club as he deemed it an organisation whose main objective was to weaken the US”. On the other hand, “Prabowo believes his government can reap economic benefits from BRICS, although the international community perceives it as a group driven by political, rather than economic interests”. In short, The Jakarta Post is preaching caution and fears that the entry into the BRICS may “compromise the national interest by placing Indonesia in a precarious position amid the complex dynamics of global power rivalries”.
In his first keynote speech, Minister for Foreign Affairs Sugiono admits: “many questioned our decision to join BRICS, saying it was against our free and active policies”, i.e., the traditional formula with which, since 1948, Indonesian diplomacy has indicated its “non-aligned” choice in the clash between great powers. On the contrary, states Sugiono, “Indonesia’s membership in BRICS is an embodiment of Indonesia’s independent and active foreign policy”.
Unity and scission
For many years, the Indian "multi-alignment formula has been the standard doctrine of the small and medium-sized powers, which want to show they are “not aligned”. Sugiono downplays the choice of joining the BRICS camp, stressing that Indonesia belongs to many other international organisations and initiatives, including the G20, the major Asian free trade agreement RCEP, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), an ephemeral regional initiative which seems to have been forgotten even by its creator, the Biden administration. Furthermore, Jakarta has begun the process for becoming a member of the pro-Western OECD club and is a candidate for the trans-Pacific agreement TPP, originally conceived as an anti-Chinese initiative.
These competing groups, expanding and partly overlapping, form a spiderweb of alliances and acronyms, a confused tangle. The core political aspect to grasp is their dual nature. On the one hand, these various boards of international co-operation and negotiation represent a fragmented form of possible multilateralism, the only form that is practicable today in the crisis of the old order and its historical institutions one need only think of how the WTO has been kept in check by the US. On the other hand, the potentially hostile nature of these coalitions, which are tools for sharing out the world market in imperialism’s permanent economic war, shines through. By moving opportunistically between OECD and BRICS, and between RCEP and TPP, Indonesia is playing a dangerous double game in which the influence of the great imperialist powers, the US, EU, Japan, and China, is obvious. At the end of the day, these powers each exert an objective gravitational pull, against which the pretence of non-alignment might prove to be illusory.
Chinese attraction
Indonesian diplomacy proclaims its strategic autonomy but, in the commodity and capital field, its close relationship with Beijing seems to be a fact that is already difficult to ignore. In the last decade, China has become Indonesia’s largest economic partner by far, now accounting for more than a quarter of its trade and foreign investment flows.
Jakarta’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) suggests that the Prabowo government should press for an expansion of the loans from the NDB development bank to the new BRICS members, observing that, until now, its funds have flowed towards projects in the five founding countries alone. The absolute figure, about $33 billion, is still very low compared to the loans issued by the World Bank, but this difference needs to be interpreted with two considerations.
First, the BRICS’ fund and bank have explicitly constituted a reserve strategy for Beijing, something to keep in the back pocket while it pursues its main aim of a reform of the old Bretton Woods institutions, which could give China a bigger role in the IMF and the World Bank.
The second, and crucial, aspect is that the huge capital exports of Chinese imperialism already take place through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), as well as the Silk Road, of which Indonesia is the main destination. An emblematic result is the high-speed Jakarta-Bandung railway line, operational since 2023, which has reduced the travelling time between the two metropolises of the island of Java from over three hours to about 45 minutes, similar to the Milan-Turin line in Italy’s industrial triangle.
Many possibilities
Considering its economic interdependence with China, joining BRICS may have been an offer Jakarta could not refuse. This does not alter the fact that, by playing on multiple tables, Indonesia keeps open the possibility of exploiting many opportunities. For example, could Prabowo’s swift accession to BRICS lead to a faster OECD membership process? Thanks to its historic influence on Jakarta, Japan immediately offered to facilitate this process. Moreover, choosing the “Global South” camp is not an impediment: Brazil, one of the BRICS founders, has been engaged in an OECD accession process for years. And Putin’s Russia was part of the G8, together with the old industrialised powers, for fifteen years, until its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
It is well known that the “BRIC” acronym, without its South African addition, was first introduced into the world debate by the British economist Jim O’Neill in a study for the US financial giant Goldman Sachs. That 2001 report suggested incorporating the four emerging economies into a G9, while reducing and unifying the representation of the European nations, which had become too small in comparison. That Anglo-Saxon-style inclusive proposal was swept away by the ensuing turbulent decades. The crisis in global relations led first to the G20 and then to the BRICS. Today, after the seismic shocks of the pandemic and the Ukrainian War, a “BRICS Plus” coalition is taking its first steps in the crisis in the world order.
The only constant factor is change: uneven economic development never ceases to modify the relations of force among the powers, reshuffling coalitions and alliances among the marauders of imperialism, making every one of their truces and agreements fragile and temporary. It is here, in the inevitability of the scission and breakdown of the order, that we find the breach for the revolutionary strategy of proletarian internationalism.
Lotta Comunista, January 2025