The five Brics countries have announced plans to add six new members to their club. Observers say the expansion is intended to make the group a stronger player in the "multi-polar world" favoured by China to counter US supremacy. Will it succeed?
The Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will welcome Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as new members starting 1 January.
In a lengthy declaration published on Thursday, the five current Brics members laid out their common goals, including strengthening the alliance through "inclusive multilateralism", "accelerated growth", a "partnership for sustainable development", "people-to-people exchanges" and "institutional development".
These vague terms are code for what China and Russia see as the building blocks for a powerful partnership that respects its members' national sovereignty and the principle of non-interference – a philosophy that contrasts starkly with the one of the US and its G7 partners, who call for a "rule-based world" and stress the principles of human rights and democracy.
"It looks as if even after all these years, it's still an organisation that's in the process of evolving and working out what it's going to do," Michael Dillon, a history professor with King's College in London, told RFI.
He pointed to a study by Goldman Sachs that concluded the only thing that the five founding Brics nations had in common was "the level of their economic development".
"They're geographically separated and have all sorts of political differences," he says, most significantly the decades-old border conflicts between China and India, while "the expanding Indian economy is certainly vying and competing with the Chinese economy".
PODCAST: Michael Dillon, History Professor with the Lau China Institute, King's College, London
Strategic expansion
The current Brics leaders hailed their latest summit as a success.
Russian Vladimir Putin stated during a speech via video link that "the global majority that the countries attending the [Brics] summit belong to is becoming increasingly tired of the pressure and manipulation" by G7 countries.
The expansion of the Brics' membership aims to strike a blow against the current dominance of the US and its allies, as perceived by Moscow and Beijing.
According to Dillon, not all current members were initially happy with the expansion, "because they thought it would weaken their position".
But they relented as the incorporation of Middle East powerhouses may "strengthen the economic power of the group, particularly in energy, with Saudi Arabia and Iran and their oil and gas riches", he says.
Arch-enemies
The expansion of Brics was heavily pushed for by China, which earlier this year also brokered a rapprochement between arch-enemies – and now new Brics members – Saudi Arabia and Iran.
"China has been quite vociferous about attempting to create a political bloc that will reduce the balance between the West and China," says Dillon.
"It's been very, very active diplomatically in the Pacific area, particularly, and they are clearly hoping that bringing these countries in will give them a great deal of support."
But will it work out?
Dillon says he is reminded of the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states, where China strongly pushed for the Non-Aligned Movement.
The meeting saw China launch the "five principles of peaceful co-existence" – self-determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, and equality – that are still the core of its foreign policy today.
Once again China is "looking to what were then were called the unaligned nations, which were neither in the communist nor in the capitalist block, and looking for a great third world alliance", Dillon says.
"Well, it didn't produce very much then and I'm not convinced that it will produce very much now, because of the internal conflicts with the existing members. And I think some of the new members are just going to bring in new conflicts as well," he says.
