Lorenzo Maria Pacini
Multipolarism, in order not to be a simple redistribution of dependence, must be accompanied by a project of economic sovereignty.
Over the last twenty years, the crisis of legitimacy of the international order built around U.S. hegemony and its financial institutions has opened up space for the reaffirmation of a geopolitical logic in global economic dynamics, allowing geoeconomics, a branch of geopolitics, to establish itself with full autonomy.
The neoliberal paradigm, codified in the so-called Washington Consensus, has progressively shown systemic limitations, particularly in the countries of the global South, where it has often produced growth without development, trade liberalization without industrialization, and monetary stabilization at the expense of fiscal sovereignty.
In the post-pandemic context, this crisis has deepened: disruptions in global value chains, the nationalization of industrial policies, the revival of the concept of economic security, and de-dollarization have marked an explicit return of the strategic dimension in economic cooperation, to the extent that new multipolar platforms are emerging strongly, proposing an alternative paradigm to the Atlanticist model.
The BRICS bloc is the most emblematic case of structural contestation of the Western multilateral system. Despite its internal heterogeneity, the group shares the goal of promoting an international order based on economic sovereignty, respect for national specificities, and greater equity in global governance through instruments such as the New Development Bank, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, the strengthening of regional currencies through targeted agreements, and decentralization from the U.S. dollar and the SWIFT system.
The Ibero-American region is a paradigmatic arena for assessing the effective capacity of multipolar platforms to offer sustainable alternatives. Historically subordinate to North American and European capital circuits, Latin America has experienced a globalist integration marked by raw material exports, recurrent macroeconomic instability, and limited industrial autonomy. In recent years, however, there has been a growing focus on South-South cooperation, thanks in part to the general resurgence of the Global South as a macro-entity challenging the collective West, located in the northern hemisphere. China has already supplanted the United States as the leading trading partner of many Latin American countries, while Russia, India, and Iran are expanding their influence through multilateral agreements. Brazil and Argentina, in particular, have shown themselves to be privileged interlocutors of the BRICS, albeit with divergent trajectories due to their respective internal political dynamics.
The central question therefore becomes: can the BRICS constitute a functional platform for responding to the economic, productive, and social aspirations of the Ibero-American region?
In theoretical terms, the BRICS model is based on a number of key principles:
- Non-interference in politics and respect for sovereignty;
- Financing not conditional on imposed structural reforms;
- Promotion of productive complementarity and not just trade;
- Construction of a multipolar order based on balance and cooperation for shared success.
In this vein, Ibero-America must address internal structural challenges to remedy the aftermath of Western dependence. First and foremost, it must break away from primary exports, whose profits are linked to foreign financial centers, and restructure its tax and international transaction systems in order to expand its investment capacity.
The BRICS and, more generally, multipolar platforms represent a historic window of opportunity for Ibero-America, because they have a broader negotiating space, a plurality of strategic partners, and the possibility of building economic agendas that are less dependent on the constraints of the global North.
Herein lies the great opportunity: Ibero-American countries can devote themselves to articulating new national economic policies consistent with their cultural tradition and with objectives that respect sovereignty and the national interest. In this direction, there will necessarily be a reform of public institutions, purging foreign apparatuses and introducing a new political class, which will have to be trained in a multipolar logic, a project that requires specific and urgent study.
Multipolarism, in order not to be a simple redistribution of dependence, must be accompanied by a project of economic sovereignty. And this is the first and most important objective of the BRICS. The challenge is both internal and international, and concerns the ability of Ibero-American societies to redefine their development model beyond subordination to one power or another.