BRICS Cooperation Advances on Many New Fronts

The BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) will hold their first BRICS Parliamentary Forum in Moscow in early July; BRICS experts will meet in late April to establish unified criteria to be employed by the BRICS Development Bank in evaluating and rating loans, projects, and countries; and a network of 25 institutes in the BRICS countries are already working on developing common methodologies for combatting money-laundering.

In the same vein as the latter, China’s anti-corruption chief, Wang Quishan, met with his Russian counterpart, Oleg Plokhoi, in Beijing on March 25, resolving to deepen coordination between these two BRICS giants in fighting corruption.

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The article announcing the BRICS Parliamentary Forum, written by Russia’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom and former Deputy Foreign Minister, Alexander Yakovenko, and posted Thursday by Russia Today, captures the new thinking, rejecting geopolitics, which underlies the new BRICS dynamic, as opposed to the “hyper-liberalism” which still dominates the West. He wrote:

“The BRICS countries are united by their aspiration to make common cause on issues concerning global development and shaping a global financial architecture that meets the requirements of the 21st century. They actively cooperate within the G20… There are currently 25 areas where BRICS cooperate. So it would be logical to add a parliamentary dimension to them….

“The BRICS parliamentary forum could address in earnest such questions and promote such values as sovereignty and independence of states, prevention of change of government by means of outside interference.

“BRICS member-states possess their common denominator of values that differs significantly from the Euro-Atlantic one, which over the last decades has largely mutated towards hyper-liberalism. The forum could provide a framework for discussion of possible ways of resolution of regional conflicts and reforming the existing international institutions, for example, the IMF. According to Russian parliamentarian Alexey Pushkov, practice shows that discussion of these questions on traditional European platforms leads nowhere. The majority, guided by Euro-Atlantic discipline, would block any draft resolutions containing assessments that differ from these narrow-minded attitudes, stuck in the Cold War past…”

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