According to the claim frequently voiced by the United States of America (USA) and European countries, China and Russia are challenging the Western World and trying to create a multipolar world by supporting and expanding platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS. According to the widely accepted understanding in the international arena, the United Nations (UN), which is the foundation of the modern era, has created an international system that the Western World mostly dominates.
The main task of the UN Security Council (UNSC) is to protect and maintain world peace and security. However, the veto powers of the permanent members of the UNSC are fundamentally contrary to the principles of sovereign equality and cast a shadow on the search for a just world. Moreover, the veto system has started to affect the peace and security of the world negatively. For this reason, Eurasian great powers such as China and Russia and developing countries of the Global South have started to organise and strongly support new platforms that can be an alternative to this Western hegemonic system. The most prominent of these multinational structures are the SCO and BRICS.
Founded at the beginning of the 21st century under the leadership of China to solve border security problems in Central Asia and fight terrorism, the SCO initiated an important expansion move by accepting Pakistan and India as full members in 2017, Iran in 2021 and Belarus in 2024. This expansion process has been the first signs of the platform’s progress towards a more global and multilateral structure.
The BRICS platform, led by China and Russia, continued its expansion towards the Global South by admitting Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates as members in 2024. The interest of Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Malaysia, as well as several other countries in Africa, America and Asia, in joining the BRICS represents a rising voice against the West’s policy of oppression on different continents.
The fact that these two platforms attract a great deal of interest from the world undoubtedly strengthens the position of Eurasian actors such as China and Russia in the international arena. While institutions such as the European Union and the G7, which represent the Western World, structurally support a unipolar-hegemonic world system, it can be argued that China shares the vision of a multipolar world.
As a neighbour to Europe, Russia’s worldview has been negatively affected by the West’s unipolar, zero-sum game approach. During the transition to a multipolar world in the early 2000s, NATO’s continued expansion threatened the national security borders of the Russian Federation, the successor of the Soviet Union. With the 2004 enlargement of NATO to the Baltics, Russia started to pursue a more proactive and hard power-based strategy and entered into a mutual power competition with the West.
Most recently, Russia, which launched a war against Ukraine in 2022, citing NATO’s ongoing expansion, entered into a polarisation race with the West and continued its zero-sum game mentality from the Cold War era. On the other hand, Russia, according to its own rhetoric, aims to ‘build a multipolar world system together with Eurasian actors and countries of the Global South’. In his latest statement on the subject, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that the SCO, together with the BRICS, are the ‘pillars of the new multipolar world order’.[i] Likewise, China emphasizes its readiness to continuously strengthen strategic coordination with Russia in international multilateral platforms such as BRICS and SCO.[ii]
However, Russia and China may have different visions and policies regarding the roles of SCO and BRICS in the new world order. First of all, both great powers agree to cooperate within the BRICS framework to overthrow the hegemony of the dollar. Both actors are also determined to create a counterweight to the Western World in the future through multipolarity-supporting platforms such as SCO and BRICS. In this context, Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his speech at the organisation’s recent Astana Summit, stressed that no matter how much the international landscape changes, the SCO must maintain its common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security foundation.[iii] At this point, the continuation of Russia’s proxy war against the West in Ukraine undermines its approach to peace and security in world politics and its vision of a multipolar world. On the other hand, China pays great attention to and decisively supports the harmonisation, development and security-stability among the member states in the multipolar world order that is being built through platforms such as SCO and BRICS.
In conclusion, Russia is more in favour of maintaining polarisation with the West as it continues the war in Ukraine. In this context, Russia tends to see and use platforms such as SCO and BRICS as important support tools in its struggle against the West. China, on the other hand, is opposed to entering into a polarisation race with the West through organisations such as the SCO and BRICS.
[i] “NATO summit matched by rise of rival SCO”, Asia Times, https://asiatimes.com/2024/07/nato-summit-matched-by-rise-of-rival-sco/, (Date of Access: 17.07.2024).
[ii] “China Says Beijing and Moscow Should Strengthen Coordination on Asia Pacific”, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-says-beijing-moscow-should-strengthen-coordination-asia-pacific-2024-02-28/, (Date of Access: 17.07.2024).
[iii] “Full text of Xi Jinping’s speech at ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus’ Meeting in Astana”, The State Council-PRC, https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202407/04/content_WS6686c48ac6d0868f4e8e8e25.html, (Date of Access: 17.07.2024).
