Birth of an Ibero-American political philosophy on the New Multipolar World

Progress ultimately boils down to robbing man of that which ennobles him, in order to sell him cheaply that which debases him.
- Nicolas Gómez Dávila

semi feudal society under colonial rule.
-Ranajit Guha

I hope you are very well, thank you very much for the invitation to this Conference on Multipolarity, thank you Leonid Savin, Alexander Dugin, the participants and the organisers. May these words be in memory of Daria Dugin, I hope they will serve as a sense of solidarity with her.

I want to make a contribution from Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory. Then I would like to move on to other more specific points of international law and geopolitics, which is important if we want to build new poles, such as a Central American and Caribbean Big Space, as Alexander Duguin puts it in his book Theory of the Multipolar World.

Post-coloniality was born in India with British imperialism in 1947 and with the end of the Second World War, which displaced the geopolitical foundations of the colonial order established by Europe from now until the 16th century. This raised a new question, which is how to build sovereignty, how to build nationality, if we have introjected, if we are saturated with an alien culture, an alien language, such as English, everything that constitutes the Commonwealth, and everything that is in the region of India, in the Global South in those times of the last century and that still remains in some cases. With this, the figure of the subaltern appears, who represents the race, the gender, the inferior state of a minority conglomerate or one that is made to think less, the one that is exploited by the coloniser. We can define post-colonialism in three variants: there is 1) the temporal definition, the context in which it was born, which is in India as I mentioned before, and 2) the discursive definition, which is the literary issues. For example, Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, talks about this, about how colonial epistemologies are configured. Then 3) the epistemic definition, how the concept of Postcolonial Theory is constructed from the rhetoric outside England and the USA.

This implies a new methodology for building a continent, in this case Asia, and came to fill some of the gaps that the colonies had. You have to remember that Costa Rica and Ibero-America were colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, England and so on. In South America some theorists such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano, Santiago Castro, the Puerto Rican Ramón Grosfoguel, among others, began to develop Theories of Decoloniality. This is a more radical position, of postcolonial studies applied here to Ibero-America where it comes to fight for a political construction different from the European currents of emancipation. My contribution, as Alexander Duguin says in his book The Fourth Political Theory, is to unite, to drink from Marxist and nationalist currents, as Nicaragua does with Sandinism, as Cuba does with Castroism, as Venezuela does with Chavism, the Patria Grande (Greater Motherland) and so on, with the Fourth Political Theory and Decolonial Theory. It is necessary to implement indigenous contributions of thought in order to articulate political theories specific to our context. Although there is some lack of use of Decolonial Theories in the actual practice of national politics in the states of Ibero-America, they are good ways of thinking and fighting. They are good ways of thinking and ideological struggles in the academy, i.e. in universities as philosophical theories born from us for us. We must also begin to construct Epistemologies of the South, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos would say, new geopolitical epistemologies (such as the Multipolar World Theory), geo-economic epistemologies, and begin to nest these Decolonial Theories, articulate them politically, make them drink with practical and organised emancipatory currents that are against the imperial regime here in Latin America in order to construct a real policy that influences the life of the state in these countries. In Central America and the Caribbean there is the Fidel Castro Foundation directed by Leonid Savin, which is a Russian think tank that interacts with Cuban thought. It allows us to see the Russian vision through the eyes of Castro's communism and also other currents of leftist thought such as Chavism, which are in tandem, united to develop another type of policy alien to US imperialism, because for the Americans we are their backyard, they are trying to establish the new Monroe Doctrine, which says that America is for the Americans. We need to break with that and to break with that it is necessary to start building tools, support networks, and articulated political movements, grassroots movements, to encourage intellectuals to a constant emancipatory production. It is a way of thinking worlds within the world, as the Multipolar World Theory and the Fourth Political Theory point out.

To begin the most substantial contribution to the conference, we will draw on Manuel Wallerstein's neo-Marxist Decolonial World-System Theory. He speaks of a World-System of modern states and nations that has three components: 1) capitalism, 2) nation-states and 3) geo-culture. Capitalism is the prevailing economic model, which developed thanks to the colonial process here in America. The nation states of the Westphalian system were implemented as a colonial model, and formed the modern world system, although it must be remembered that here in Latin America it was different than in India because in Latin America the imperial system was decadent, so we began to build independence from there, together with previous struggles of the original peoples, while in India it is a little different.

My critique is mostly about state-building that has to do with the Multipolar World, and he articulated it with Perpetual Peace and Pax Romana. It is worth mentioning the enormous practical similarity of Perpetual Peace and the Pax Romana. While Immanuel Kant's "On Perpetual Peace" has a configuration which, to everyone's common sense and appreciation, refers to the pursuit of world peace by means of the measures it advocates, for example that "standing armies (miles perpetuus) must disappear completely in time" or "No public debt should be issued in connection with foreign policy matters" or "No state should forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another".

The text needs to be carefully analysed, and the implications behind some of the postulates, and I will focus on the following. Let us first emphasize that the construction of a peaceful cosmopolitan society, which is Kant's objective in the treatise and in the text "Metaphysics of Customs" in its section Theory of Law, section two of point 53 onwards, postulates that it is viable to wage war of one state against another state, and he points out in the following way: "all rights of peoples or peoples' rights (Recht der Volker) and all external mine and thine of states that can be acquired or achieved through war is merely provisional, i.e. war is permitted, a war of conquest, which in this context is an all-out war to make this unipolar worldview model survive against the emerging multipolar order model (which is far removed from these European and American epistemic canons). And it can only become peremptory and become a true state of peace in a union of states (Staatenverein) of a general character or a cosmopolitan state (analogous to that by virtue of which a people becomes a state)". By this he means that what constitutes us in order to have a say in the world as a state, needs as a fundamental factor to belong to this cosmopolitan state. This union of a general character, of a universal state governed by a world law, is what the United Nations Organisation (UNO) and international law propose, it is what Kant calls cosmopolitan law. There is also the development of slogan number 5 of the first section of the treatise "On Perpetual Peace" where he mentions that intervention in a state is possible if the state is divided into two parts as a result of internal dissensions and that each of the parts represents a particular state with the claim to be the whole. This encourages the Cold War, for example, the conflicts in North Vietnam, South Vietnam, North Korea, South Korea, Sandinism and the Contras, and the other processes that existed in Latin America between left-wing movements and right-wing dictatorships.

In the first assumption the similarity of the Pax Romana is clearly exposed, where first the provinces or territories have to be conquered by war or altercation in order to establish peace. This is the same peace that certain imperialist powers apply in contemporary history. We also have the cases of sedition and high treason in countries, where two sides are generated in the country and there is a warlike altercation. There are also requirements in the treatise on how the political configuration of states should be. For Kant, states must be republican in tendency, and if this is not the case, perpetual peace cannot be achieved.

This is what we have experienced in the world for many centuries, since the implementation of the nation-state, and I do not mean that this juridical-political figure is wrong or that its usefulness has expired, but that in regions such as Ibero-America it served as a structure to build hegemony and command political leaders, social movements and intellectuals and bring them into the camp of the unipolar world.

It is no coincidence that the first permanent international tribunal created in the history of international law was the Central American Court of Justice, in Cartago, Costa Rica, which today is the San Luis Gonzaga College, created in 1907 and lasted until 1917 We already had that internationalist germ proposed by Kant, which sought to homogenise groups of states in the same direction. This does not mean that it is wrong to seek articulation between states at the legal level for common struggles within our civilisational character, but it is extremely emasculating to follow this current of thought and make it global as it is done today. This would encourage the global networks of the Cosmopolitan State and fall into the dynamics of the Pax Romana.

It is important to be clear that we have to break with this and leave the best of it. If we continue to use ideological apparatuses such as the United Nations Organisation (UN), which are the product of disputes and power relations, concretized after the Second World War. Moreover, specifically in the Americas, the Organisation of American States (OAS) serves as an instrument, using European epistemologies and slave thinking, to fight against dissident thoughts against the order imposed by the United States and Europe. As has been seen in the appeal to the Inter-American Democratic Charter of the OAS to attack states with other political directions outside the imperial order, such as Venezuela and Nicaragua.

In addition to this, the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), the organisations of countries to develop a common goal, such as the Pacific Alliance, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). They come to develop legal, economic and social changes in the countries which, with this slave-like thinking and this state apparatus aligned with the imperial interests, promote labour exploitation by means of reforms of the labour laws of the member countries. They also change the economic model of production to fit in with these organisations, inducing the liberalisation of the economy, promoting in most cases the import of production from third world countries and the export of important raw materials to the developed countries, as the slave epistemologies tell us, and there is no search for national development or food sovereignty. They impose on us an enclave thinking of economic and social development, which is a function of the world division of labour and the world economic system that favours the colonial powers.

We suffer from an ideological and cultural subordination that does not allow us to fight against these mechanisms imposed by capitalism and the victorious ideology of the Second World War, liberalism. It must be understood that liberalism in its three characteristic facets, 1) the importance of private property, 2) the supremacy of the individual over the collective and 3) the self-regulation of the market, are paradigms of interpretation and practice. These are paradigms of interpretation and practice of reality that are contradictory to the dynamics of emerging countries. The new development and growth trends of countries are illiberal. Moreover, it has been shown that the implementation of liberalism necessarily requires for its viability the destruction of human beings and nature.

This emerging Multipolar New World has to contemplate all possible forms of life and start from the particularity of the peoples in order to build an existential network where the living sentiments of all peoples converge. A great contribution we have from Russia is the Fourth Political Theory which, in its ontological matrix, fulfils the characteristic that makes it possible to adapt it to Ibero-American thought, as well as providing us with a tool to understand the logic of the Eurasian and Western world today, something unthinkable from political theories based on the dichotomy of right and left. It must be stressed that we have a whole history that supports us from our ethnic origin, language, customs, spirituality, geography, flora, fauna, and other components that build an Ibero-American Creole ethos. It is our task, the task of Ibero-Americans to put forward, from what we have, in the intellectual sector and in the politically historical movements of the States with revolutionary tendencies, proposals to free ourselves once and for all from the mechanisms that impoverish us, from the meanings of "progress" that work for the "progress" of other barbaric civilizations in decadence, that only seek their own well-being without caring about tyrannizing any people, any sentiment, any God to achieve their objectives.

The struggle for the palpitation of the worlds has already begun and it is strong, the Russian Special Military Operation against Ukraine is only the beginning of the new world. This struggle will be won because this logic of the New Multipolar World requires it, and with it the development of the New history of humanity.

Pain Gloriaque