The head of the powerful financing arm of the European Union has warned that unless the West rapidly steps up its support efforts, it runs the risk of losing the trust of the global south, with China and Russia among others stepping in.
The BRICS conference this week in South Africa and efforts to position the group’s New Development Bank, often known as the BRICS bank, as a rival to well-established Western multilateral lenders, Werner Hoyer, the president of the European Investment Bank, said, emphasized the need to dramatically boost financing. Hoyer told reporters that the fact that smaller developing states, particularly in Africa, are turning to emerging market nations rather than conventional Western institutions for support should be cause for concern. EIB is among those organizations. It has the largest balance sheet of any multilateral development bank in the world and invests roughly 10 billion euros ($10.8 billion) annually through its EIB Global branch in the developing world. This is made possible by the financial might of the EU’s 27 member states. Hoyer’s remarks on the aspirations of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—to enlarge the bloc and make it a worldwide counterweight to the West are the strongest yet from a high-ranking EU official. He claimed that the number of developing nations who took a neutral posture regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year also demonstrated the difficulty the West was having in keeping such nations’ trust. Hoyer stated, “Recent decisions in the United Nations General Assembly have already made it apparent that we risk losing the trust of the global south unless we take more action and become more visible there. Next month’s U.N. gatherings, which include a summit on sustainable development, present a chance for Western institutions to participate and show that they are prepared and willing to support poorer nations more, according to Hoyer. Many poor nations were “feeling abandoned” by the West in their difficulties with the COVID-19 pandemic, debt, energy costs, and climate change, he continued, which is why there is now a greater emphasis on expanding the BRICS organization and on its bank. The BRICS countries founded the New Development Bank in 2015; it has its main office in Shanghai. Since then, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have all joined, and negotiations are currently underway for membership for Algeria, Argentina, Ethiopia, Honduras, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay, and Zimbabwe. Hoyer characterized the bank’s increased significance as “symptomatic of something that Europe and Western institutions must urgently confront.” “We are in trouble unless we offer sincere partnership and more persuasive approaches to address the challenges of the Global South, whether it is in the energy transition, the debt issue, or tackling glaring health inequality.”
