The Declaration as a Mirror

   The Declaration as a Mirror

GEOPOLITICS◊THE GRAMMAR OF NON-ALIGNMENT— PT I 

BRICS spent two days in New Delhi perfecting the art of saying nothing about everything. Every small state now speaks some version of that language — Guyana included.

 Opinion By:  Editorial Board

There is a particular diplomatic skill in producing a 140-point declaration that manages to address a war, a trade dispute, and a regional conflict without naming a single aggressor. The New Delhi Declaration, adopted unanimously by the eleven members of BRICS on September 12, achieves exactly that. It is worth reading closely — not for what it commits its signatories to, which is little, but for what it reveals about how states positioned between great powers have learned to talk.

The bloc’s members expressed “deep concern” over escalation in the Middle East and called for “maximum restraint,” without mentioning the United States, Israel, or Iran by name — despite Iran sitting inside the room as a full member and the United Arab Emirates, a fellow member, having faced Iranian strikes during the same conflict. On the war in Ukraine, the declaration goes further in its avoidance: it does not name the war at all, folding it instead into a generic reference to “conflicts in many parts of the world” and rising global military spending. Russia is a founding member of BRICS. The war has now run past its fourth year.

The bloc’s official position on it, as expressed by its own founders, is silence dressed as principle.

THE MECHANICS OF SAYING NOTHING

This is not incompetence. It is method. Consensus among eleven states with genuinely divergent interests — Iran and the UAE on opposite sides of a shooting war, India and China maintaining a wary economic truce, Russia sanctioned by half the Western world while India imports its discounted crude — can only be produced by retreating to language specific enough to sound like a position and vague enough that no member has to defend it at home. The declaration condemns “unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures” without naming Washington, even though the United States is the obvious author of the tariff regime every BRICS economy is currently absorbing. It condemns sanctions “not authorised by the United Nations Security Council” without naming the sanctions regime against Russia specifically, even though that is transparently what the clause exists to address.

The declaration’s real subject is not Iran, or Ukraine, or tariffs. Its real subject is the discipline of consensus among states that cannot afford to name their antagonists out loud.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed the summit as a “coming of age” moment for the bloc, and used the occasion to argue that the Global South should become a “rule-shaper” rather than a passive recipient of an international order built elsewhere. It is a compelling line, and one BRICS leaders have reached for before. But the declaration adopted the same day is itself the clearest evidence against it. A rule-shaper names the rule it objects to and the actor enforcing it. What New Delhi produced instead was a document engineered to avoid exactly that act — a text built around omission rather than assertion, whose unifying skill is diplomatic evasion rather than collective position-taking.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE SUMMIT HALL

It would be easy to read the New Delhi Declaration as a curiosity of great-power diplomacy, remote from the concerns of a country like Guyana, which holds no seat at that table. That would be a mistake. Guyana is not a BRICS member, but it occupies precisely the structural position the declaration’s vagueness is designed to manage: a smaller state sitting inside the gravitational pull of competing powers, needing the goodwill of more than one of them simultaneously, and therefore developing its own instinct for language that commits to nothing while appearing to commit to something. The same caution that keeps BRICS from naming Washington on tariffs or Moscow on Ukraine has an analogue much closer to home — in how Georgetown talks, and more importantly does not talk, about the infrastructure financing, security arrangements, and diplomatic visits now arriving from more than one direction at once.

That is the subject of the next two parts of this series: not BRICS itself, but the grammar it has perfected, and whether Guyana’s own conduct in an increasingly contested Atlantic corridor amounts to the rule-shaping its allies abroad keep promising, or the same careful, protective silence dressed up in different vocabulary.

Part Two of this series examines Guyana’s own “carefully generalised language” — from the Berbice deepwater port financing shift to the Landau visit and the air-domain-awareness memorandum of understanding — against the diplomatic grammar identified here.

–The Board