Indonesia's unexpected move lends credence to the claim by BRICS that it
speaks for the Global South.
Indonesia quietly and unexpectedly joined the BRICS bloc last week,
bringing the number of full members to 10 and substantially boosting the
group's combined economy by over 5% to more than $28-trillion, just beyond
that of America, a symbolic achievement.
Adding Indonesia also arguably boosted the credibility of BRICS' claim to
be a representative body of the non-aligned Global South, rather than a
Russia-China support group, as its critics suspect Moscow and Beijing are
trying to turn it into.
Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, becomes the first nation
in that region to join the original five members - Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa – as well as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab
Emirates, which were admitted as members at the 2023 BRICS summit in
Johannesburg in 2023.
Warm welcome
Jakarta's decision to join has been warmly welcomed by the other BRICS
members. It offsets the embarrassment caused by Argentina declining the
invitation to join in 2023, and Saudi Arabia neither accepting nor declining
The accession of Indonesia, announced only last week by the current Brazil
chair, surprised outsiders. It is not clear why it took so long. Brazilian
officials said that the five founding BRICS members had offered Indonesia
membership as far back as the Johannesburg summit
But Indonesia had then asked for more time to formally respond because
national elections had been looming, they said. These elections were held in
February 2024, and Prabowo Subianto replaced Joko Widodo as president. But
that was almost a year ago.
Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, national director of the SA Institute of
International Affairs, said Indonesia's joining reflected a shift in
Indonesia's foreign policy under new president Subianto. She said under
Widodo, Indonesia had sought to join the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of developed countries.
But Sidiropoulos said she thought that option was still on the table and it
could be that Indonesia was pursuing a multi-alignment strategy, like India.
She saw Indonesia joining BRICS as a positive development, noting that
during its G20 presidency in 2022, "Indonesia was quite adept at
navigating between global powers, and I don't think it's a country that will
seek polarisation over mutual benefit.
"It brings into the grouping an important Southeast Asian
economy."
'Asset to bloc'
Sanusha Naidoo, senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue
(IGD), agreed that adding Indonesia was an asset to BRICS. She thought the
delay in announcing the accession might have been because Indonesia had
decided to join only after the election of Donald Trump as US president.
US President-elect Donald Trump.
This had added to the uncertainties of the global environment, particularly
because of Trump's threats to resort widely to increased trade tariffs. This
might have prompted Indonesia to seek greater security in the BRICS alliance.
She said Indonesia joining had significant strategic implications both for
itself and for BRICS. It provided impetus to BRICS as a body representing the
interests of the Global South.
As Indonesia was a member of the G20, it increased the leverage of BRICS in
that global forum. She also noted that Indonesia added weight to the BRICS
non-aligned posture because of its historical role in hosting the 1955
Bandung Conference, which laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement in
the Cold War.
Arina Muresan, a senior researcher at IGD, said she believed BRICS might
also have chosen Indonesia from all the contenders for strategic reasons. She
noted that in a time of rising geopolitical uncertainty, Indonesia commanded
the Strait of Malacca, the shortest sea route between China and India, which
is extremely busy, especially with oil tankers from the Middle East.
After the Johannesburg summit when BRICS announced its first new members,
Jim O'Neill, the British economist who coined the BRICs concept in 2001, told
Daily Maverick that the new members had not "dramatically boosted"
the total economic clout of the bloc.
He said he was puzzled that Indonesia had been left out despite its large
economy and its success in navigating internal and global challenges,
arguably better than any other major commodity producer.
Added clout
Now that omission has been corrected. Indonesia has added clout. Its
$1.371-trillion GDP in 2023 boosts the combined BRICS GDP by 5%, from
$27.416-trillion to $28.787-trillion. That, incidentally, pushes it above the
$27.720-trillion of the US economy.
The BRICS share then reaches just over 27% of the $106.171-trillion global
economy. This is all in nominal dollar terms.
In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms – which measures what a country's
currency can buy domestically, Indonesia's GDP of $4.334-trillion boosts the
total BRICS GDP of $66.862-trillion by even more, by about 6%, to
$71.197-trillion. That increases the share of the combined BRICS economy to
about 36% of the global GDP of some $ 185.696 trillion in PPP terms.
The addition of Indonesia's population of 282.47 million also boosts the
total BRICS population by nearly 8% from 3.546 billion to 3.828 billion –
which then constitutes more than 47% of the world's population.
Indonesia also boosts the land mass (excluding territorial waters) of BRICS
by about 5.4%, from 33,597,435km2 to 35,409,006km2.
Further expansion of BRICS seems likely. At the last summit in Kazan,
Russia last October, Moscow announced that BRICS had offered
"partnership" in BRICS to 13 countries. This included Indonesia
which even then had not decided to become a full member. The other 12 were
Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda,
Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Algeria and Belarus.
Russia has since announced that Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba,
Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan have accepted the invitations while
the other four countries have not yet replied.
Partnership offers some, but not all the benefits of full membership, and
is seen as being a stepping stone to full membership. |
