The Three Sovereignties: The Civilizational Crisis of the West By: Oscar David Rojas Silva

There are three levels at which the advance or retreat of a country can be measured in its difficult struggle for emancipation. Since the fifteenth century, colonialism—as the Dantean origin of violence in its most extreme expression—shattered not only the economies of the different countries it touched, but also their political systems, collective imagination, and personal relationships. For this reason, a country must begin primarily by recovering its political sovereignty; that is, by developing the capacity to recognize the state as the embodiment of the national community rather than as an invading colonial entity. This is a necessary prerequisite, without which nothing else can be contemplated. Deceptive liberal democracy has always served as the straitjacket disguising bourgeois interests behind every supposed alternative. Therefore, the struggle to overcome electoral fraud and the intervention of de facto powers becomes the principal task at this level.

Once this first stage has been achieved, it is necessary to move toward the second level: economic sovereignty. Its material basis depends on the state’s capacity to establish certain general conditions of production that allow it to retain economic energy (value), to the greatest possible degree, within the metabolism of social being; that is, so that economic activity and its fruits cease to be produced in the abstract, for endless accumulation, and instead become anchored to the concrete needs of social reproduction. In this way, the economic body can sustain sovereign policies across four areas: energy, food, technology, and credit.

It should be emphasized that these possibilities are not merely decisions or abstract declarations, but concrete realities that require continuity in their construction. For this reason, the logic of alternation inherent in liberal democracy has always constituted a trap that prevents the consolidation of a harmoniously developed form. In Mexico’s case, the struggle against fraud and the political consolidation of the “second floor” of the transformation point toward a model of popular democracy that has decisively chosen to reaffirm the continuity of the development plan currently underway. Political sovereignty demonstrates its progress if we consider how the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have progressively undergone transformations in their internal logic. For this reason, the current debate surrounding corporate media and the rights of audiences is a sign that the process is now continuing into what is known as the fourth estate. This also explains why reducing violence is a central issue: territorial integrity and the pacification of the country are, without question, prerequisites for consolidating this level.

Political sovereignty, in turn, opens the path toward economic sovereignty. It is no minor detail that one of the major changes experienced since 2018 was the adoption of a National Development Plan (PND) rooted in the country’s own conditions, rather than in a series of abstract policies dictated by the International Monetary Fund and its associated agencies. From the PND to Plan Mexico, we have witnessed the need to preserve energy resources and promote import substitution in favor of a new domestic market. This struggle already falls within the second level of analysis proposed here.

​The process is developing under the unprecedented condition that our economy is anchored to the decline of the hegemonic economy, which simultaneously displays strident interventionism and chronic weakness. This represents a genuine opportunity to reorganize our own economy and, in doing so, contribute to economic sovereignty.

At this level, it is important to remember that industrial development is not an end in itself. The objective is not to sacrifice the collective worker or nature, but rather to use these new capacities to create a new political-philosophical cycle that gives a new social content to the outcome of the process. Economic sovereignty enables a genuine praxis that affects the economy as a whole: markets are not merely arenas of competition; they can also become spaces of cooperation. But this requires the capacity to transform the prevailing paradigm of interventionism into the projection of a different vision of humanity. We thus arrive at the third level: civilizational sovereignty.

China offers an example of this path. It began its struggle for political sovereignty with the 1949 revolution, and in 1978, with the opening-up process, entered a new stage in which it constructed the economic sovereignty it now possesses across the four areas mentioned above. This process has enabled China to begin advancing a worldview distinct from that of the West. Xi Jinping has already launched four initiatives aimed at restructuring the global economy: the Global Development Initiative (2021), the Global Security Initiative (2022), the Global Civilization Initiative (2023), and, most recently, the Global Governance Initiative (2025), presented by Xi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin on the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, this rise of the East is taking material form through the New Silk Road—which, since its launch in 2013, has incorporated more than 150 countries and accumulated commitments exceeding $1.3 trillion in investment and construction contracts—and is accompanied by a renewed spirit among different countries that, when they look toward the West, see only a succession of abuses and sanctions, not to mention constant diplomatic mistreatment. We must insist that the East does not reproduce the Western paradigm of a single dominant pole, but rather its opposite: a path toward achieving civilizational sovereignty which, this time, cannot remain confined within national territory. Its field of action is now planetary. Therefore, encouraging the economic sovereignty of countries in the Global South is not a form of “philanthropic aid,” but rather a prerequisite for advancing this third level, which is now multipolar. Consequently, the new economic models emerging in this new era must possess not only an industrial policy but also a civilizational policy, rooted in the development of the social content specific to a new historical moment.

By contrast, when we examine the current conditions of the United States, we observe a generalized crisis. In reverse order: (a) the United States is undergoing a civilizational crisis, as the American Dream has ceased to function as the standard, while its immediate sphere of influence, represented by the G7 (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan), has lost leadership and increasingly sustains itself through constant aggression. At this level, the loss of its military capacity to impose conditions is also notable: it has begun its withdrawal from West Asia, marked by its defeat against Iran, while the wound left by what was once supposed to have been its great victory over the Soviet bloc remains open today. (b) Economic sovereignty is likewise compromised, due to weak growth marked by chronic and astronomical debt—which by August 2026 had surpassed $39.8 trillion, equivalent to nearly 123 percent of GDP—while the country has become a deficit nation: a consumer, but not a producer.

Having benefited from the advantages of issuing the key global currency, the dollar, is now beginning to exact its price. (c) In the sphere of political sovereignty, the system is in crisis due to the moral collapse associated with the Epstein files and the excessive use of mechanisms of subjective warfare, which employ constant distortion in the struggle over who has the right to steer the same ship amid the aforementioned polycrisis. The United States has had little choice but to seek refuge, once again, in the asymmetry of territories it has historically controlled, as in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). We are witnessing the stridency and chronic lack of respect displayed by the U.S. elite as the symbol of a power that, in practice, has already been lost.

In sum, if we think of Latin America and the Caribbean as a bloc, we need to promote the rebirth of a shared worldview with the aim of beginning the process of recovering political sovereignty. We should not forget that the revived Monroe Doctrine—originally proclaimed in 1823 and revived by Washington at the end of 2025 in the form of the so-called “Trump Corollary”—shares its historical origins with the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama, convened by Simón Bolívar in 1826 as the first attempt at continental unity against that same hegemonic ambition. The recent rightward turn in Latin America and the Caribbean has been a symbol of the civilizational crisis of the United States; the case of Argentina under Milei already warns us that algorithmic deception can be powerful, but its effects are not lasting. It seems to me that Latin America and the Caribbean will turn again in search of genuine social alternatives, but for this to happen it is necessary to build on the foundations of a new vision. This means beginning with the recovery of historical civilizational processes already experienced in order to project a new attempt to seize the future. This time, it will not be merely declarative, but grounded in a real economic foundation.

Translated from Spanish to English with ChatGPT.

---

Originally published on ContraLinea

---

Author
​
Oscar David Rojas Silva. Economist (University of Guadalajara); master’s and doctoral degrees (UNAM) in the critique of political economy. Academic at FES Acatlán. Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Capitalism and a communicator specializing in critical thought at Radio del Azufre and Academia del Azufre.

---