Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was surprisingly critical in the remarks that he made during his participation in the SCO+ meeting that took place after the SCO leaders’ summit in Bishkek in early September. He declared that “People expect concrete actions from us in the direction of multipolarity. Time is running out. If we lose time, we may become the United Nations as it exists. But in the future, we can act as a catalyst for the recovery of the UN.”
He suggested that their shared goal should be “returning it to the status of a platform for solving the most complex global problems, and not an instrument in the hands of the West to exert pressure and coerce sovereign and independent states. But for some reason, we are also afraid to talk about this.” Lukashenko then said that “I am convinced that the development of the Eurasian Charter for Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century will contribute to this process.”
Be that as it may, he ended on the note that “We are ready to act actively and purposefully. Frankly speaking, we expect this from our leaders. No matter how equal we may be here, we recognize that we have three most powerful states — the People’s Republic of China, India, the Russian Federation — powerful nuclear countries in terms of economy and resources. First of all, we expect initiative from them. Unfortunately, there is no such initiative yet.” His criticism of those three deserves elaboration.
In a perfect world, the Russia-India-China (RIC) core of BRICS that later became the core of the SCO upon India’s membership therein would closely coordinate to accelerate financial multipolarity processes with a view towards gradually reforming global governance, but that’s much easier said than done. Both the BRICS Bank and the SCO Bank, each based in China, comply with US sanctions against Russia as proven by the preceding hyperlinked analyses that cite official sources that confirm this “inconvenient fact”.
On the bilateral level, China and India informally comply with some of them as well, with all this being due to their complex economic interdependence with the West that makes them vulnerable to punitive secondary sanctions. China and India also remain rivals despite their recent rapprochement, which reduces the prospects of them closely coordinating on anything of significance at the global systemic level. This capsized the lofty plans for a new currency that BRICS’ media surrogates used to hype up.
The reality is that while RIC shares the same overall vision of heralding a sustainably multipolar world order, the immediate national interests of its two Asian pillars take precedence over their collective grand strategic ones. This is due to their rivalry and complex economic interdependence with the West. While progress is being made on mending their ties and reducing the aforesaid interdependence, there’s still a long way to go before they closely coordinate to advance their shared vision of the future order.
Nevertheless, RIC can still accelerate financial multipolarity processes by sanctions-proofing intra-BRICS and -SCO banking, maintaining their focus on using national currencies, and extending more low-interest non-dollar loans to other countries through their new institutions. This can eventually create a non-Western financial ecosystem that could in turn empower the greatest number of countries to collectively work towards global governance reform through the regional-centric means suggested here.
