G-15 Challenges World Powers' Monopolies

"The forthcoming conference of the Group of 15 (G-15), with Asian, African, and Latin American members to be held on May 17, 2010, in Tehran is at a time that various nations' propensities in seeing a multipolar world in political, cultural and economic terms are at its highest level. In such circumstances, the way is paved for strengthening regional coalitions which aim to increase the bargaining chips of emerging powers like Iran, Brazil, Argentina, India, Indonesia, Egypt, etc, also the members of G-15, and allow them to pursue their own independent economic and political-strategic perspectives on regional and global issues.

G-15 was established in 1989 to pursue two aims. The first aim was to facilitate trade, technology transfer, and investments in developing countries and to give them more bargaining power with such international bodies as World Trade Organization (WTO), the G-8, and developed and industrialized states on the one hand, and increase bilateral and regional economic and political cooperation among members on the other. For example, the G-15 members can negotiate on the creation of a multilateral and fair trade system whose goal would be to give fair access to international capital markets, commodities, and services to all developing countries within the framework of the Tehran conference. Previously, the 16-billion-dollar contract between Iran and Malaysia, two G-15 members, signed in December 2007 for the development of gas resources of Iran and production of liquefied gas, was made possible within the G-15 cooperation setup.

The second and more important goal pursued by the G-15 is to bolster bilateral and multilateral political and strategic coalitions among member states to enhance their bargaining position through their independent national approaches aside from the dominant western ones. For instance, the issue of Iran's uranium swap deal will surely be discussed between Iran and Brazil on the sideline of the G-15 summit...."

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