When Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the BRICS summit in New Delhi that the Global South must "shape, not just follow" the rules of world order, he was not saying anything new. He was, whether he knew it or not, echoing a room in Algiers half a century earlier, and a village in Yugoslavia before that, and a hundred anti-colonial parliaments before that. The BRICS Delhi Declaration, a 45-page document calling for UN Security Council reform, criticizing "unilateral" tariffs, rejecting Europe's carbon border tax, and urging restraint in West Asia, is the latest chapter in a very old story: the world's excluded majority trying to write itself into rules made without its consent.

The question worth asking is not whether this ambition is legitimate. It obviously is. The question is whether this particular vehicle, an unwieldy coalition of five nations (now expanded) with wildly different interests, can actually deliver what a century of similar coalitions could not.

An old grievance, freshly worded

The instinct behind BRICS is at least as old as decolonization itself. World War II shattered the myth of European invincibility: Japan's victories over British, Dutch, and French forces in Asia meant that colonized peoples who had fought to expel one occupier had little appetite to submit to another. The result was a wave of new states across Africa and the Middle East through the 1950s and 60s. In 1973 many of these nations gathered in Algiers and declared themselves the "Third World," determined to stay outside both the American and Soviet blocs. That gathering was a direct ancestor of the Non-Aligned Movement, a forum that today counts 120 members and remains, after the UN itself, the largest grouping of states on earth.

The vocabulary has shifted since 1973. "Third World" gave way to "Global South," a term UNCTAD now uses to describe the developing and least-developed nations of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania, distinct from a "Global North" of North America, Europe, and a handful of wealthy Asian and Pacific states. But the underlying grievance is unchanged: a small club of powers, victors of a war fought eighty years ago, still holds the pen that drafts the rules everyone else must follow.

Nowhere is this more visible than at the United Nations Security Council, whose five permanent members and veto power were fixed in 1945 and have not moved since, even as the world's population and economic weight shifted decisively toward Asia and Africa. Modi's declaration that Security Council reform "can no longer be delayed" is not merely a talking point; it is the single demand that has united Global South diplomacy since the 1990s. Notably, China and Russia's declaration language backing India and Brazil's aspirations for expanded UN roles marks real, if cautious, movement on this front, since Beijing has historically been the most reluctant of the five permanent members to entertain any dilution of its exclusive status.

Defiance has a mixed record

History offers two templates for what happens when a state or bloc tries to defy the dominant order, and BRICS would do well to study both.

The first is Tito's Yugoslavia. In 1948, Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform after Tito refused Soviet demands for centralized economic control, and Moscow cut off aid expecting Belgrade to collapse. It didn't. Tito was too popular domestically to topple, and he built a genuinely distinct model: worker-managed industry, decentralized communes, and trade with both Cold War blocs simultaneously. By 1955 Khrushchev himself traveled to Belgrade to patch things up, effectively conceding that non-alignment could work. Yugoslavia's lesson is that defiance succeeds when it is backed by real internal coherence and a leader secure enough at home to withstand external pressure.

The second template is the Middle East after decolonization, and it is a cautionary one. Britain and France withdrew formal control gracefully in name only, granting Iraq independence in 1932, Jordan in 1946, and Syria and Lebanon in 1945, only for the Cold War to immediately fill the vacuum they left. Nationalist governments that tried to chart independent courses were frequently swept aside; the pro-Western Baghdad Pact government in Iraq, led by Faisal and Nuri es-Said, was overthrown in 1958 after years of trying to balance nationalist sentiment against foreign patronage. The lesson here is less comforting: formal independence and rhetorical non-alignment count for little without the economic and military weight to make them stick.

BRICS today looks more like an attempt at the Yugoslav model at civilizational scale: five or more large economies trying to build enough collective weight that no single power center, Washington or Brussels or anyone else, can simply override them. Its rejection of the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism as "protectionist," alongside its call for a "just and equitable" energy transition, is precisely this kind of collective pushback. No single BRICS member could credibly resist Europe's carbon tariffs alone, but together they can at least register formal objection.

The UN's own scar tissue

It would be naive to treat UN reform as a simple matter of fairness delayed. The UN's structural weaknesses are well documented and older than most of its critics realize. The veto power that lets any of the five permanent members block action has been invoked to shield the Soviet Union over Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan in 1980. The organization has no standing army of its own and depends entirely on member states volunteering troops, a weakness Secretary-General Kofi Annan tried to address by proposing permanent brigade-size forces of 5,000 soldiers for rapid deployment. Funding shortfalls are chronic; in 1986 alone, 98 members were in arrears on dues. And the growing Third World majority in the General Assembly, ironically, has made it harder rather than easier to pass resolutions that satisfy both Western and non-Western blocs.

Then there is the deeper problem BRICS is implicitly organized against: American primacy exercised outside the UN framework altogether. The Bush administration's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, followed by the 2003 invasion of Iraq without Security Council authorization, demonstrated that a determined superpower can simply route around the UN when the UN's answer is inconvenient. Even the choice of Secretary-General has not been immune to this pressure; Washington is widely understood to have engineered the replacement of Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the more accommodating Kofi Annan in 1996. If the lesson of the Security Council veto is that great powers can block unwanted UN action, the lesson of Iraq 2003 is that they can also simply ignore the UN when blocking isn't even necessary.

This is the paradox BRICS has to reckon with. Its members want more seats at a table whose authority has already been shown, repeatedly, to be optional for whoever sits at its head. Reforming the Security Council's membership does nothing to fix the deeper problem that the strongest chair in the room can always choose to stand up and leave.

What would actually be new

None of this means the Delhi Declaration is empty theater. Calling for "dialogue and diplomacy" as the only viable path in West Asia, and securing unanimous consensus on that language despite real disagreements among BRICS members over the region, was a genuine diplomatic achievement for Indian hosting. Urging "maximum restraint" while the war raged was not nothing, even if it fell short of a binding mechanism.

But history's verdict on movements like this one is stubbornly consistent: declarations of principle multiply far faster than institutions of enforcement. The Non-Aligned Movement produced eloquent communiqués for seventy years while its members quietly aligned, unaligned, and realigned according to Cold War convenience anyway. What actually changed the balance of power in the twentieth century was rarely a declaration; it was Yugoslavia's internal cohesion under Tito, or the sheer economic weight China accumulated after 1978, or the military and demographic reality that made colonial occupation unsustainable after 1945.

If BRICS wants its 2027 governance roadmap, floated by Modi at this summit, to mean more than the Algiers declaration of 1973 did, it will need something the Third World movement never had: enough internal economic integration among its own members that walking away from them costs the rest of the world real money. Rhetoric about shaping rather than following rules is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. The rest of the twentieth century is a long, patient argument for that proposition, and the twenty-first has so far offered no evidence to the contrary.