Building a Transborder Social Identity within BRICS+ and a Fragmented Multilateral World

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

This editorial discusses the ongoing difficulties and future challenges that BRICS nations face on their way to a meaningful political impact and supplementary relevance on a global level. More often than not, stakeholders and decision-makers ignore crucial and fundamental necessities that societies require in order to enable and initiate a sustainable and lasting process of growth. Potentially, politicians in charge may be aware of the importance of such anthropological pieces of the puzzle and should accordingly put them on their agenda. Reality seems to prove that the general focus is widely placed on targeting and canvassing short-term financial turnovers and outcomes related to the balancing or unbalancing of global impact only. Forecasting the failure of such progress, this text offers a more convenient strategy for finding one’s position within the global community, based on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and a holistic approach to peacebuilding.

KEYWORDS

Social identity, global alliance, political divergence, multilateral fragmentation, global stability, sustainable world order, holistic peacebuilding

INTRODUCTION

Starting off our journey, I would like to create a common ground of understanding by having a brief look at the status quo of the BRICS community in the year 2025. Being initially a group of interest, the geopolitical relevance of Brazil, Russia, India, and China was discussed by the Goldman Sachs researcher Jim O’Neill in 2001 (O’Neill 2001), thereby introducing the term and the notion of the BRIC states (Mostafa 2013). It makes sense to mention that South Africa was accepted as the first additional member in 2010 (Harrison 2018). South Africa thereby formed the fifth member of the alliance, occasioned the name change to the common term BRICS, and complemented the group in a meaningful geopolitical way (Erdmann 2024b).

By reviewing the economic history of the group’s members, we can see that all these states underwent crucial economic changes and faced challenging financial situations in the late twentieth century (EFSAS 2023). Awareness of the members’ natural resources, the increasing level of global consumption, the improvement of pricing strategies, and the expanding interlinkage of world trade later established overall economic stability (EFSAS 2023) within these states. Nowadays this group finds itself in an economically comfortable situation (Erdmann 2024a), controlling a meaningful quantity of the world’s natural resources and holding a key role in global trade (Iqbal 2021).

Being still a purely economically oriented alliance, the group could not be more diverse in a multitude of aspects. Potentially this, and the complexity of the alliance in itself, is one reason why it took the group 24 years to grow from the initial four states to a more significant number of members (Glogowski 2024). Even though the number of states interested in partnering with BRICS extends this number by far, we may still find a lack of a focused and determined agenda explaining what BRICS actually stands for. The currently available communiqués look like lists of interests stated by the broad quantity of members and partners, while every country intends to get its individual points onto the paper. In particular, the vague formulation of an agenda bears many uncertain aspects that can turn out to be uncomfortable for countries finding themselves in this specific economic alliance. While being part of BRICS, many of these members strengthen their independence and stability by trading with potential opponents of the group (Erdmann 2024b). This inconsistency and contradiction give birth to an inner instability that prevents BRICS from building the solid and impactful global force that it might be looking for, namely an entity that strongly leads or manages the world economy and world politics at the same time, based on its all-embracing network and its holdings of fundamental natural resources.

MAIN CORPUS

A hyper-diverse global alliance called BRICS

The subject of our analysis often presents itself as a fast-growing economic unity that stands up in order to challenge the potentially existing Western financial and trade order, and to reorganise it towards a much-needed balance, or towards leading it into the opposite extreme. Even though such a balancing and unbalancing process, depending on one’s perspective, takes place continuously, we are now having a look at the uniqueness of the M.U.M. model (Erdmann 2024b). This model describes the ongoing shift between multipolarism and unipolarism and back again, as it presents itself at the beginning of this millennium. In my previous article on the dynamics of polarized pluralism, I already explained and outlined the nature of this phenomenon, while the present text extends the previous dynamics in global reach and impact.

Being aware of the picture that potentially underlies a specific strategic plan, and that is therefore projected towards the public, we also want to paint a picture based on our own research and our own understanding of this situation, which is highly interlinked with the world community. Basically, we are talking about a global alliance that stretches over four continents, currently counts nine full member countries, and has recently accepted thirteen partner countries (Norton 2024). In order to identify even more complexity, we need to say that its members are spread over four continents, while economic partnership with selected members of BRICS spans all five.

The fact that BRICS finds itself completely decentralised often turns out to be an impactful selling point, while it could also materialise as the weakest point in the portfolio. Sharing a mutual interest in common economic growth, the alliance includes a broad quantity of languages, cultures, political systems, and diverse trade partners, and above all a wide range of economic competencies and capabilities (Solomon 2022) among its members, although this last point may not apply to all partners, as many of them suffer considerable economic instability. This level of diversity turns the alliance into a highly heterogeneous group (BpB 2023), and perhaps into the most diverse group that has ever existed in modern history on a global scale. The ongoing strategic expansion of BRICS forms part of the alliance’s goal of raising its economic power and its global relevance based on natural resources (Tseen Fu 2024). A closer but unreflected view may suggest that the goal of the alliance is simply to create a trade network of producers and consumers excluding what may be labelled as Western countries. A protracted exclusion from the so-called Western world order makes members of the alliance strike back by continuously admitting new members, propagating inclusiveness (Tseen Fu 2024), and increasing the level of country-based diversity to a more extensive and questionable degree.

My article on BRICS and the art of growing from within already discussed the extraordinary challenge for a transcontinental and inter-political alliance to grow in a sound and sustainable way (Erdmann 2024a), especially when potentially authoritarian regimes and opposing economic relations are compressed into one group. Nonetheless, besides already being extraordinarily diverse, BRICS continues to extend the number of its members and partners and thereby raises the level of internal complexity. A brief look at some of the core members of BRICS, namely China and India, shows how two almost historic rivals find themselves placed in one alliance while remaining highly competitive opponents on a multitude of levels. Interestingly enough, Russia takes over the role of a mediator in order to bring such members closer together (Baunov 2024). Four of the recently admitted members are likewise involved in complex disputes. Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a long-term dispute over regional predominance and political integrity (Desta 2011), while Egypt and Ethiopia find themselves in an ongoing contention over natural resources, namely the dispute over the waters of the Nile (BpB 2023).

A baseless iceberg?

Considering the ambitious growth and the overall target of BRICS, namely to be the rebalancing tool in world economics, we may wonder where this vision and motivation actually come from. The worldwide economic playing field offers a multitude of alliances for countries to join, to participate in actively, and through which to create lasting benefits. Forming part of the G20 and BRICS at the same time is such an ambivalent example that it raises many questions. All founding members of BRICS, including South Africa, are members of the G20, while they identified the need not only to join a more Western-run alliance but also to be part of an opposing one that challenges the economic stability of several member states of the former. Such a contradiction does not support one’s credibility in having a clear vision, but more likely creates uncertainty on a global scale, a feature that mankind currently does not need at all, and potentially turns out to be a very poor political strategy that supports fragmentation instead of unification.

The more we examine the peak of the iceberg, namely the image of BRICS that is communicated to the broad public, the more complex and confusing the setting of this potential alliance becomes. Step by step, we may discover what looks like a bottomless construct that is lost in its own complexity. You may see that I even challenge the term alliance as such, which traditionally identifies a group of countries or parties that share one common goal or interest (Cambridge 2025). The previously mentioned communiqués and the global economic interlinkages of the group’s members suggest interests pointing in all possible political directions, while some look for economic growth, others target financial stability, still others try to enrich their global network, and finally some aim to appear as challenging as possible towards potential Western opponents (Baunov 2024). This seems to be the new identity of a Russian-led BRICS, namely a focus on the number of members and potentially less on the realistic, productive impact that new partners may provide. Adding new members to BRICS while continuing to fight in Ukraine may also serve as a wider legitimation for the Russian leadership to proceed in this political direction.

Nobody can deny that joining BRICS as a member or partner in these times serves as a political message towards the global community. Such countries should be well aware of the meaning of this symbolic act, namely that they support what BRICS members commonly stand for. Here, a potentially anti-Western perspective (Baunov 2024) may serve as a common point of interest, while most members remain involved in trading with a multitude of Western countries. Generally, we can observe that joining a group incorporates or requires two fundamental points, namely that each member supports the overall group target and supports what individual peer members stand for. This simple fact perfectly underlines the level of contradiction in which BRICS finds itself, especially with reference to dual memberships in alliances that are for and against the Western order. Whether it be the potentially anti-Western course, the unclear overall target of BRICS, or the Russian prominence in constantly inviting new members (Baunov 2024), this uncertainty does not attract everyone. It is worth noting that Argentina declined to join and that the position of Saudi Arabia remains unclear, as no official confirmation of accession can be identified (Baunov 2024). The fact that Russia, on the basis of its activism, placed itself in a leading position within BRICS made the character of the group change from an initially cooperative alliance targeting mutual development into something closer to an instrument of unpredictable anti-Western messaging, losing itself in the baseless complexity of a self-focused worldview and partial global interests.

Even though such a global partnership has the potential to float solidly like an iceberg, its opacity beneath the surface extends to such a degree that its baselessness starts creating downforce instead of supporting the whole superstructure. The fundamental question may be what measures need to be taken to turn the currently existing construct into a globally responsible, well-respected alliance that supports peace, mutual respect, and socio-economic growth, if this is the goal at all.

Ordo ab chao

Considering that BRICS is currently more a rag rug of nations longing for sustainable economic growth and wealth management, we may commonly agree that there is no access to wealth without prior management. Such management needs to initiate or create the path towards wealth that may be taken by all members, partners, and applicants in the same way. In order to begin building such a path, we need to understand how to build a supportive order that enables the individual, whether a single person or a nation, to understand how it defines itself and where this conceptual structure comes from.

Here we need to face one specific reality, namely that the level of diversity that BRICS covers surpasses that of existing regional or continental alliances and unions by far. In this way BRICS may not be compared, on the basis of its complexity of cultures, languages, religions, and economic necessities, to any other existing union, such as the European Union, the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or the Union of South American Nations. Currently we do not see indications supporting the understanding that BRICS needs to grow from within (Erdmann 2024a) in order to become sound, to grow in a sustainable way, and to build a lasting global value for mankind. In the meantime, the focus may be placed on growing by number, on the basis that more and more members and partners are accepted, promising them credibility and legitimacy (Adams 2023).

Having such widespread diversity as a foundation, we may understand that what is needed is a common creed or a transborder identity that reconciles differences and harmonises diversity in an all-embracing way. The term identity offers us a very complex nature and a rich scale of interpretations. As soon as consciousness is sharpened and the individual realises their own existence, the quest for an identity is born. Identity is a multilayered word that is of importance on an individual level, a group level, a regional level, a national level, a continental level, and that may reach its climax on a global level, including ethnicities, languages, creeds, and cultures. Even though we may identify a multitude of different sorts of identity, they all seem to have one common denominator, namely the quest for a harmonic and organised aspect.

Accordingly, we may imagine that it is a very tricky project to create or build a truly transborder identity, since what is needed is something that people can believe in, that connects them, and that motivates them to start speaking of themselves as a sound community. What we are looking for is the still missing central piece of the puzzle that completes the artwork and that gives a higher meaning to angles, visions, and perspectives. This piece could turn chaos into order and provide BRICS with the opportunity to stop being a potentially unpredictable challenger to the existing global construct. BRICS could leave this image behind and start growing solidly within itself and within the global community, in order to become a cornerstone for global balance, peace, and harmony. This missing link, or transborder identity, can only be identified and developed by the community of BRICS itself (Yzerbyt 1997), and starts with the discernment that only merged pieces complete the picture, or that all countries are needed to build a lasting global community.

SUMMARY

The argument advanced here moves from a diagnosis to a proposal that is deliberately larger than its subject. The diagnosis is that BRICS has grown by addition rather than from within, that its members hold interests which point in incompatible directions, and that an association defined chiefly by what it is not cannot supply the coherence that its stated ambitions require. The proposal is that what such a grouping lacks is not a better communiqué but a shared identity, and that identity cannot be manufactured from above because it forms among people rather than between governments. The final turn is the one that distinguishes this text from a policy assessment: if the difficulty is that alliances define themselves by exclusion, then the remedy cannot be a better alliance, and the author accordingly declines to offer BRICS a strategy and offers instead the observation that the only membership large enough to solve the problem is one that no one has to be admitted to.

CONCLUSION

In order to be able to build a transborder identity that truly combines a highly diverse membership, we need to understand the uniqueness of the common goal and the specific challenges of the setting in question. Traditionally a group identifies itself as such on the basis of a common language, dialect, culture, history, or tradition (Akuche 2016). Obviously, not all members of the wider BRICS circle are different, but they are potentially diverse. Some of them share languages but not dialects; others share religions but not their traditions within them. Here we can clearly see that diversity is not the same as fragmentation, which is more likely the counterpart of unity. Having stated at the beginning that the high level of diversity among the nations involved may be the weak spot of BRICS, we find ourselves at the point of turning a fragile ornament into the truss of a superstructure. This means that if it proves possible to build an identity among BRICS members, it should also be realistic to build an even stronger one, namely the identity of a global community, incorporating those previously mentioned.

We may have learned so far that building a transborder identity is an extensive task, especially as setting a foundation of common understanding begins with each person and targets the overall conformity of the sum of diverse individuals wishing to label themselves as members of the group. Here we may challenge the traditional concepts of strategic economic growth, and the methods accordingly based on building inclusive and exclusive alliances such as the G20, the G7, BRICS, and NATO. The question that we need to analyse for ourselves is whether such an exclusive mindset still meets the necessities of today’s global and multilateral world.

My reflection and analysis reveal to me that exclusive behaviour often turns out to be a strong indication of an advanced level of fear of loss or disadvantage. On the basis of our general global connectivity, referring to individuals, companies, organisations, and countries, I strongly doubt that building, separating, and fragmenting economic borders supports global growth. Accordingly, such labelling supports exclusiveness, which in itself is often a door opener for fragmentation and extremism (Erdmann 2024c). What mankind potentially needs in a time of economic and social insecurity is a common creed that binds all humans together at the bottom of their hearts, a creed that is so fundamental that it touches and supports basic human necessities, namely stability, peace, and harmony. If we do not build harmony at the grassroots level of the individual and their family, we have no space in which to develop a sound identity that surpasses borders and embraces the wealth of mankind.

You may already sense where this will possibly take us. BRICS, but more likely mankind itself, needs to create the consciousness of a global community, and more specifically the awareness that exclusiveness and fragmentation do not support real stability and global growth in the long term. In order to initiate such a process we need politicians who act like responsible adults and who understand that owning the biggest piece of the cake does not automatically grant satisfaction. On the basis of what has been written so far, we may all imagine a world without the trade associations and unions mentioned above, and we may envision that what we more likely need is a common level of true responsibility towards the planet Earth and towards mankind, far beyond self-centred and ignorant behaviour that rests on and reproduces chaotic circumstances in the human mindset and on the surface that we walk on.

Therefore BRICS, and again mankind in general, needs an agenda that clearly communicates, in a reasonable and realistic way, shared values that offer tranquillity on a global level and enable mankind to develop a common identity, not as individuals but as a global community. It is crucial here to emphasise the importance of a name, and not to place an excluding name in the front row, such as BRICS, the G20, or the G7. Now it is humankind that counts first, it is humankind that needs to turn into a global community of mutual respect and responsibility, it is humankind that needs to connect and grow from within, and it is humankind that does not need a name in order to differ, because it already has a name that binds all of us together, namely citizens of the world.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The central claim here, that an association without a shared identity cannot become more than the sum of its transactions, is well made and can be tested against what the group has actually built, which strengthens the argument in one direction and qualifies it in another.

The qualification first. Some of what BRICS has produced does not depend on shared identity at all. The New Development Bank lends, the contingent reserve arrangement exists, and the arrangements for settlement in national currencies have expanded, in each case because the members had a convergent interest in reducing dependence on a single financial system rather than because they agreed about anything else. This is the pattern the functionalist literature describes: cooperation in narrow technical domains proceeds among parties who share nothing else, and it sometimes generates the trust that broader cooperation requires. Judged as a coalition of convenience with limited objectives, the record is more substantial than the framing of an incoherent alliance suggests.

The support comes at the point where the ambition exceeds that. A common currency, a coordinated political position, or collective action against a third party each require members to accept costs for the group, and that is precisely what identity supplies and what interest alone does not. The author’s diagnosis therefore holds for everything BRICS says it wants to become, and the internal disputes he lists, between two members over a border, between two over regional primacy, and between two over a river, are the concrete form of the difficulty.

Two additions belong here. The observation that members trade extensively with those the group defines itself against is accurate and it points somewhere the text does not go: it is evidence that the anti-Western framing is a rhetorical register rather than an operating principle, and the states concerned have been explicit that they seek additional options rather than an alternative bloc. Read that way, the incoherence the author identifies is less a failure of the alliance than an accurate representation of what its members want, which is not to choose. And the difficulty of building identity in a heterogeneous grouping has been studied in the case the text sets aside as incomparable: the European experience suggests that shared identity followed decades of functional integration rather than preceding it, that it remains contested, and that the institutions which produced it were courts, parliaments, exchange programmes and a common market rather than declarations.

Finally, the closing turn deserves to be taken as seriously as it is meant. The argument that exclusive groupings reproduce the fragmentation they are formed to protect against is the same argument this journal makes about identity at every other scale, and its consistency is the point. It also carries the difficulty that every universalist proposal carries: an identity that excludes no one motivates no one, and the practical work therefore lies not in replacing particular loyalties but in nesting them, so that a person can be a citizen of a place and of the world without the first requiring the second to be false. That is the dual identity finding from the intergroup literature, and it is the mechanism by which the aspiration in the final paragraph could become something other than an aspiration.

*Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

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Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2023) Erweiterung der BRICS Gruppe. https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/540816/erweiterung-der-brics-gruppe/

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Erdmann, Daniel (2024b) The Dynamics of Polarized Pluralism: On the Benefits, Challenges, and Threats of a Constantly Changing Fragmented World Order. WMO Conflict Insight. ISSN 2628 6998. https://worldmediation.org/the-dynamics-of-polarized-pluralism-on-the-benefits-challenges-and-threats-of-a-constantly-changing-fragmented-world-order/

Erdmann, Daniel (2024c) Personal Identity and Peacebuilding: A Critical Reflection. WMO Conflict Insight. ISSN 2628 6998. https://worldmediation.org/personal-identity-and-peace-building/

Glogowski, Aleksander (2024) India, Pakistan and BRICS after the 2024 Kazan Summit. https://www.academia.edu/125302884/India_Pakistan_and_BRICS_after_the_2024_Kazan_summit

Harrison, Philip (2018) South Africa in the BRICS. https://www.academia.edu/116590774/South_Africa_in_the_BRICS

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Mostafa, Mahmood (2013) The Rise of the BRICS and Their Challenge to the G7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271724885_The_rise_of_the_BRICS_and_their_challenge_to_the_G7

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Yzerbyt, Vincent (1997) Building a European Identity. https://www.academia.edu/84255502/Building_a_European_identity

Further reading added by the WMO Editorial Team

Agreement on the New Development Bank, Fortaleza, 15 July 2014, and the Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, 2014.

Kazan Declaration of the XVI BRICS Summit, 23 October 2024.

Haas, E. B. (1958). The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces 1950 to 1957. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Acharya, A. (2018). Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Stuenkel, O. (2020). The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (2nd edition). Lexington Books, Lanham.

Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model. Psychology Press, Philadelphia.

Risse, T. (2010). A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.