Why BRICS does not need a leader

BRICS members differ sharply in power, politics and interests.

Their ability to manage those divisions may be the secret of the group’s global influence When the BRIC group, as it was known then, first emerged, it was greeted with amusement as another exotic variety of alphabet soup in the age of globalization.

As it became a more permanent fixture, it was regarded as a poor man’s version of a global club, like a humble answer to the G7.

More recently, it has come to be feared, not least by US President Donald Trump, as a potential threat to the dominance of the American dollar.

In the run-up to the 2026 BRICS summit in New Delhi, the Western media shifted its focus to the divergences within the group, essentially portraying it as something less than the sum of its parts.

However, all these interpretations miss the actual significance of BRICS, which is its role as an early model of the emerging multipolar order.

Over the past five centuries or so, roughly the period of Western global hegemony, the world order has invariably been based on the dominance of a single power, whether Spain, France, Britain or America, or a combination of powers, such as the Concert of Europe or the US-Soviet bipolar system.

Single-power hegemony remains very much alive in the West today, whether one looks at NATO, AUKUS, international financial institutions or Washington-led alliances in Asia and elsewhere.

True, the European Union does not exactly fit this model, but it has NATO as its bedrock, while its members maintain strong, and unequal, relations with the United States.

Read more 20 years of BRICS: From Wall Street acronym to global power center What keeps these countries together isn’t merely geopolitics and geoeconomics, given they also share a broadly similar worldview, even if its liberal and conservative versions can occasionally clash rather vehemently.

Taken together, they represent Western civilization, along with a handful of associates, but BRICS is a very different creature.

Its members vary enormously in population, territory, economic weight, military strength and technological and scientific capabilities and their histories aren’t as closely intertwined as those of Europe and North America, while their political systems are highly diverse and their domestic and foreign policies often point in different directions.

Most fundamentally, they represent several great civilizations, including Chinese and Confucian, Indian and Hindu, Islamic, Persian and Arab, Latin American, African and Russian.

In this sense, they’re anything but like-minded, yet they reflect the diversity of humankind itself.