The New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the XVIII BRICS Summit, provides a particularly significant vantage point from which to observe the transformation of the international order. Comprising 140 paragraphs and framed around the theme Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, the document reflects the consolidation of a grouping that is now markedly different from the one that emerged at the beginning of the century as an expression of the major emerging economies. The Summit coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the group and concludes an Indian Chairship that convened more than four hundred meetings across thirty cities in the country. The BRICS are increasingly emerging as one of the arenas in which the Global South’s growing demand for political, economic and cultural representation is taking shape.
The most immediate feature is the recognition of multipolarity as a defining characteristic of contemporary international reality. The Declaration explicitly refers to the “contemporary realities of the multipolar world” and links multipolarity to the ability of emerging and developing countries to expand their room for action. The Global South is described as a “driver for positive change”, while the BRICS assume the task of representing its needs in the construction of a more just, sustainable, inclusive, representative and stable international order, grounded in international law.
This is an important shift: multipolarity is no longer presented as a future scenario or a political aspiration, but is instead treated as a defining feature of the current historical phase. What remains open is the form that this redistribution of power will ultimately take..
The Crisis of Universalism and the Pluralism of Orders
The New Delhi Declaration should be read against the backdrop of the progressive erosion of the order that took shape under predominantly Western hegemony after 1945 and, even more markedly, after the end of the bipolar system.
For approximately three decades, the West’s material superiority was accompanied by a tendency to present its own particular political, economic and cultural configuration as a general normative horizon. Western liberal democracy, the global market governed through institutions shaped by the distribution of power that emerged from the Second World War, and a particular conception of rights and development acquired a role that extended beyond the societies in which they had historically developed.
That phase now appears to be facing evident difficulties. The challenge emerging from the Global South does not necessarily entail a rejection of multilateral institutions or the principles of international law: the Declaration itself insists on the central role of the United Nations, the UN Charter, fundamental rights and multilateral cooperation. What is being called into question, rather, is the possibility that a particular centre may continue to define criteria, hierarchies and modes of application deemed universally valid.
It is significant that New Delhi associates the strengthening of multipolarity with respect for the «diversity of national systems and development pathways». The pluralisation of power thus tends to be accompanied by a pluralisation of political and development pathways.
The Return of Bandung
One of the most politically and symbolically significant passages is the reference to the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. The Declaration explicitly recalls the principles of equality, independence, non-intervention and mutual benefit, and states that the “Bandung Spirit” continues to provide a point of reference for the construction of a more equitable, inclusive and representative multilateral system. Shortly before this, the text welcomes the resolution in which the General Assembly characterised the trafficking of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity and calls for the full implementation of the resolution aimed at eradicating colonialism in all its forms and manifestations. The reference to the 1955 Conference therefore forms part of a claim that retains both a historical and a legal dimension, rather than being merely commemorative.
The reference is not ritualistic. Bandung represented an attempt to free Asian and African countries from the necessity of placing themselves entirely within one of the two camps of the Cold War, and the central issue was autonomy: the possibility of participating in world politics without adopting as their own categories and priorities formulated elsewhere.
Seventy years later, the issue is re-emerging under profoundly changed conditions. The system is no longer bipolar, and many of the states that then belonged to the peripheries now possess far greater economic, demographic, technological and military resources. Autonomy no longer concerns diplomatic non-alignment alone: it extends to finance, infrastructure, technology, energy, logistics chains, knowledge and, increasingly, the capacity to define autonomously the categories through which the world is interpreted. The reference to Bandung thus acquires contemporary significance: it reaffirms the pursuit of autonomous room for manoeuvre under the changed conditions of the international order.
Reforming the Existing Order
The BRICS, at least in the New Delhi Declaration, do not propose dismantling the existing international institutions; rather, they call for changes in the distribution of power within them. Reform of the United Nations Security Council should broaden the representation of Africa, Asia and Latin America, while China and Russia reiterate their support for the aspirations of India and Brazil to play a greater role in the United Nations, including the Security Council.
A similar position is taken with regard to the Bretton Woods institutions. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are not rejected; instead, the Declaration calls for quotas, voting rights, governance structures and leadership selection mechanisms to reflect the weight that emerging economies have acquired in the global economy.
The same approach can be seen in the field of trade. The Declaration defends the World Trade Organization, calls for the restoration of its binding dispute settlement mechanism and for the appointment of the missing members of the Appellate Body; at the same time, it welcomes China’s extension of zero-tariff treatment to fifty-three African countries, a measure that operates outside the multilateral framework and, in practice, compensates for its paralysis. The G20 is assigned the role of the premier forum for international economic cooperation, with the explicit task of fostering a multipolar world..
This position deserves attention because it avoids an overly schematic reading of the BRICS as a front simply antagonistic to the West. The process under way appears more complex: on the one hand, the transformation of existing institutions is being advocated; on the other, instruments are being developed that may progressively reduce dependence on those same institutions. Reform and autonomy proceed together.
From Multipolarity to Polycentrism
It is at this level that, in my view, the New Delhi Declaration acquires its greatest geopolitical significance. The document employs the concept of multipolarity, which, however, primarily describes the distribution of power among states; if analysis is confined to this category, there is a risk of failing to grasp the full extent of the transformation under way.
What emerges from the Declaration is, in fact, an increasingly complex web of institutions, payment mechanisms, technical networks and cooperative bodies that progressively contribute to the formation of spaces capable of generating decisions, connectivity, knowledge and room for action.
It is here that the notion of polycentrism may prove more appropriate. A polycentric order does not simply coincide with a system in which several great powers exist: it encompasses states, large geopolitical spaces, international and regional organisations, infrastructural networks, financial circuits, technological platforms and centres of knowledge production. The distribution of power thus also becomes a distribution of the capacity to organise space and to create the material conditions for autonomous action. The Declaration provides numerous examples of this tendency.
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