Ben Norton
The Global
South-led organization BRICS has expanded again.
Indonesia, the
largest country in Southeast Asia, has officially been admitted into the group
as a full member.
Indonesia is the
fourth-most populous country on Earth, with the seventh-biggest economy.
BRICS now has 10
full members. These are:
Brazil
Russia
India
China
South Africa
Egypt
Ethiopia
Indonesia
Iran
United Arab
Emirates
Another eight
countries became BRICS partners in January 2025 as well, including:
Belarus
Bolivia
Cuba
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Thailand
Uganda
Uzbekistan
The following is
a map of BRICS members and partners, as of January 6, 2025:
BRICS makes up
41.41% of global GDP (PPP)
The 18 BRICS
members and partners made up 41.4% of global GDP, when measured at purchasing
power parity (PPP), according to October 2024 data published by the IMF.
Just the 10
BRICS full members comprised 38.8% of global GDP (PPP) in 2024.
BRICS countries
make up a significantly larger share of the global economy than the G7, the
group of seven Western countries that colonized most of the world.
Combined, G7
members Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the
United States comprised 29.08% of world GDP (PPP) in 2024.
By contrast,
BRICS members and partners were together 41.41% of the global economy.
Indonesia: the
world’s only nickel superpower
Indonesia’s
economy is larger than that of the UK and France, which are permanent members
of the UN Security Council. Indonesia makes up 2.44% of global GDP (PPP),
compared to just 2.2% for the UK and France.
Indonesia is the
world’s number one producer of nickel, by a large margin. Nickel is an
important mineral needed for renewable energy technologies like batteries and
solar panels.
In the past
decade, the Indonesian government has embarked upon an ambitious
industrialization program. Through careful state planning and industrial
policy, Jakarta banned the export of raw minerals and, with strategic
investments from Chinese state-owned enterprises and favorable loans from
Chinese state-owned banks, Indonesia has moved up the value chain, processing
nickel at home, instead of simply exporting the ore.
By capturing
more value in the production process, Indonesia quintupled its nickel revenue,
from just $6 billion in 2013, when it only exported raw ore, to $30 billion in
2022, when it domestically processed the mineral.
ASEAN prefers
China over USA
China is the
number one trading partner of Indonesia. Nearly a quarter of Indonesia’s
exports (22.58%) went to China in 2022, and 28.52% of Indonesia’s imports came
from China.
China is also
the top trading partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
as a whole.
A 2024 poll
found that a slim majority (50.5%) of people in ASEAN as a whole would choose
to ally with China over the United States, if they had to pick one.
In Indonesia,
73.2% of the population prefers China, whereas just 26.8% would go with the
U.S.
Many Southeast
Asian nations have joined BRICS in the global de-dollarization movement,
seeking alternatives to the dollar and the U.S.-dominated global financial
system. At a summit in 2023, ASEAN members signed a deal to increase the use of
local currencies in cross-border transactions and regional trade.
BRICS goals:
reform global governance institutions and deepen Global South cooperation
At its 2024
summit in Kazan, Russia, BRICS endorsed a comprehensive plan to transform the
international monetary and financial system, to benefit formerly colonized
countries in the Global South.
In its capacity
as chair of BRICS in 2025, Brazil announced on January 6 that Indonesia had
been admitted as a full member.
Brasilia
revealed that Jakarta had been invited to become a member at the 2023 BRICS
conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, but the Indonesian government asked
to delay the offer until after its 2024 presidential election.
Brazil stressed
that the top goals of BRICS are to “reform global governance institutions” and
to “deepen the cooperation of the Global South”.
In a statement
congratulating Indonesia’s entry into the organization, China’s Foreign
Ministry stated:
“BRICS is a main platform for promoting
solidarity and cooperation of the Global South and a major force driving the
reform of the global governance system. BRICS countries are always committed to
multilateralism, fairness and justice, and common development. BRICS’s latest
addition follows the historic trend of the collective rise of the Global South.”
Indonesia’s
historic role in the anti-colonial movement
Indonesia’s
entry into BRICS is deeply symbolic, given the leading role the country played
in the anti-colonial movement in the 1950s and ’60s.
Indonesia’s
leftist anti-imperialist leader Sukarno sponsored the Bandung Conference in
1955, and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.
The
founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (from left to right): India’s Jawaharlal
Nehru, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesia’s Sukarno,
and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.
Sukarno was
overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup in 1965. Following his ouster,
Indonesia’s right-wing military dictatorship, led by General Suharto, carried
out what is known as a politicide, or a political genocide.
With assistance
from the U.S. government, Indonesia’s military junta killed between 1 million
and 3 million leftists in 1965 and 1966, destroying the enormous Communist
Party of Indonesia and massacring anyone accused of sympathizing with
socialism.
The Washington
Post reported on this in 1990, in an article titled “U.S. officials’ lists
aided Indonesian bloodbath in ’60s”. The newspaper wrote:
“U.S. officials 25 years ago supplied
the names of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party to the army
in Jakarta, which at the time was hunting down the leftists and killing them in
a crackdown branded as one of the century’s worst massacres, former U.S.
diplomats and CIA officials say.”
“For the first time, the officials are
acknowledging that they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of
communist operatives, from the top echelons down to village cadres in
Indonesia, the world’s fifth most populous nation. As many as 5,000 names were
furnished over a period of months to the army there, and the Americans later
checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to
the former U.S. officials.”
“The assassinations were part of a
massive bloodletting that decimated the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) in
Indonesia, a Southeast Asian archipelago of more than 13,500 islands. The PKI
was the third-largest Communist Party in the world at the time, with 3 million
members, and through affiliated organizations–such as labor and youth groups–it
claimed the loyalties of 17 million others.”
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