Ricardo Morín Triangulation 10: A Planetary Proposal 22″ x 30″ Watercolor and wax pencil on paper 2007
Ricardo F. Morín
November 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor
PREFACE
This essay proceeds from a simple recognition: the political structures inherited by humanity no longer correspond to the forces that now shape its survival. Climate volatility, digital acceleration, economic interdependence, and cross-border vulnerability operate at a planetary scale. They pass through air, water, data, and supply chains without regard for territorial boundaries. Yet the world remains organized as a collection of discrete sovereignties, each responsible for risks it can neither contain nor resolve alone.
What follows does not issue from optimism, inevitability, or visions of harmony. It begins instead from insufficiency. The institutions that once stabilized political life were not designed for conditions in which disruption propagates globally and instantaneously. The proposal set out here—a layered system of planetary coordination, universal provisioning, and protections for cultural autonomy—does not attempt to predict what political forms will emerge. It offers, rather, a conceptual architecture for what has become thinkable if human continuity is to remain plausible under conditions of deep interdependence.
The essay unfolds in three movements. First, it outlines a framework proportionate to the scale of contemporary risk. Second, it confronts the strongest objections—psychological, cultural, geopolitical, economic, and historical—that constrain any such reorganization. The analysis turns to transitional forms through which local identity may persist and coordination may emerge under conditions where fragmentation has already introduced risk.The work does not prescribe a future; it remains within the horizon in which political imagination operates.
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FRAMING WITHIN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY
i
This essay draws on a growing body of political theory concerned with the widening gap between global pressures and the limited reach of the nation-State. Thinkers such as Ulrich Beck (World Risk Society, 1999), David Held (Democracy and the Global Order, 1995), Jürgen Habermas (The Postnational Constellation, 2001), and Saskia Sassen (Territory, Authority, Rights, 2006) have traced how climate change, digital systems, and economic interdependence now exceed the capacities of territorial governance. Beck identifies risk itself as global; Held and Habermas explore multilevel governance; Sassen traces how authority migrates across networks that bypass borders. This essay remains aligned with these insights and grounds its argument in material conditions already in force, rather than in the likelihood that existing States will unify.
ii
World-risk theorists—particularly Beck and Anthony Giddens (Runaway World, 1999)—describe a world bound by shared vulnerability: climate instability, pandemics, financial contagion, and digital exposure. No State can contain these alone. This essay takes that diagnosis as given by treating shared risk as the central justification for institutional redesign. Research on overlapping sovereignty, including the work of Anne-Marie Slaughter (A New World Order, 2004) and Neil Walker (Intimations of Global Law, 2015), demonstrates that authority is already dispersed across levels. What follows is an observation: dispersion without structure produces fragility; shared authority depends on deliberate design rather than on processes that accumulate without coordination.
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Philosophers of global justice such as Martha Nussbaum (Frontiers of Justice, 2006), Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, 1999), and Thomas Pogge (World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002) argue that basic human capabilities can no longer be secured solely within national borders. Welfare and opportunity have become transnational facts. Environmental political theorists such as Bruno Latour (Facing Gaia, 2017) and Robyn Eckersley (The Green State, 2004) further show that ecological systems impose demands no single government can meet. This essay treats as consequential these claims by proposing institutions scaled to ecological and technological interdependence rather than inherited jurisdiction.
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Debates on digital power reinforce this necessity. Scholars such as Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019), Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI, 2021), and Helen Nissenbaum (Privacy in Context, 2010) document how artificial intelligence, data infrastructures, and algorithmic systems operate across borders while they evade national oversight. Technological power now moves independently of the frameworks intended to regulate it. The proposal places technological governance at the core of planetary coordination, not as an auxiliary concern.
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Taken together, these strands suggest that neither nationalist retrenchment nor abstract universalism is adequate to present conditions. This essay proceeds from contemporary theory to articulate a political horizon grounded in necessity: viz. governance scaled to the forces that now shape human survival. It is not oriented toward abstraction, but toward a readable and coherent proposal calibrated to the realities already unfolding.
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I. The Proposal: A New World for a Species in Convergence
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Humanity now occupies a threshold at which inherited political forms can no longer absorb the pressures shaping collective life. Climate instability, digital acceleration, migratory displacement, and economic interdependence operate at planetary scale. They traverse borders with a velocity that state-based systems were never designed to manage. Under such conditions, the question of survival converges with the question of institutional redesign.
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The proposal proceeds from the recognition that sovereign States fragment responsibility at the very moment when coherence becomes necessary. Risks propagate globally; accountability remains local. A planetary framework emerges not as aspiration, but as a proportionate response to vulnerabilities that exceed national capacity.
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Such a framework is limited to exercising authority only where fragmentation produces systemic exposure: viz. public health, climate stabilization, migration, resource governance, and global technologies. Cultural, legal, and administrative autonomy would remain firmly vested in regional and local institutions.
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Universal welfare forms the structural foundation of this arrangement. It functions not as charity, but as stabilization. In an interconnected world, deprivation in one region generates instability across many. Access to healthcare, essential resources, and meaningful education defines the minimum threshold for participation in collective life.
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A reconfiguration of value follows. Markets continue to operate, but certain goods—health, education, environmental security, and digital access—are guaranteed as rights. Universal income gives way to universal provisioning: a commitment to the material and intellectual conditions required for dignity and resilience.
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As these changes take shape, borders assume a different role. They persist as administrative markers, but their capacity to regulate risk diminishes. Climate systems ignore boundaries; pathogens cross unchecked; digital infrastructures dissolve territorial limits. A planetary architecture emerges not as an endpoint, but as an adjustment to conditions already in motion.
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Articulating such a world is not an act of idealism, but of proportional reasoning. Contemporary pressures demand political imagination commensurate with their scale. This proposal does not predict the future; it remains within the horizon.
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II. The Counterarguments:A Devil’s Advocate Examination
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The first objection concerns identity. Sovereignty functions not only as law, but as a vessel of memory, history, and emotional continuity. A planetary framework introduces an additional layer of identification without historical precedent.
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Geopolitical resistance follows. States—particularly powerful ones—have little incentive to dilute strategic advantage. Any global authority risks being perceived as erosion rather than coordination.
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A third objection concerns scale. Institutions operating at planetary scope risk opacity, inertia, or capture. Coordination at such magnitude may introduce new forms of fragility.
Cultural arguments register homogenization. Even with formal protections, global systems may exert subtle pressures toward uniformity, diluting linguistic and cultural specificity.
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Psychological objections emphasize limits of restraint. Planetary cooperation presumes capacities for empathy and self-limitation that may not persist without enforcement.
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Historical memory sharpens skepticism. Integrative projects have often provoked fragmentation. A planetary framework could generate resistance precisely because of its scale.
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Taken together, these objections outline a dense field of constraint—psychological, cultural, geopolitical, organizational, and historical—that complicates any transition toward planetary organization.
III. The Resolution: A Movement Toward Planetary Organization
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A credible resolution requires incorporation of these objections rather than dismiss them. Planetary coherence must be built where resistance is strongest, not where agreement is easiest.
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The first element takes the form of architecture. Governance must be layered, not monolithic. Global authority is limited to narrow domains of shared vulnerability; States retain internal autonomy. Legal boundaries, transparency, and distributed representation constrain concentration of power.
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The second element concerns welfare. Universal provisioning establishes a structural baseline financed through global levies and coordinated national systems. Markets operate above this floor; essential goods are insulated from volatility.
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The third element addresses identity. Planetary citizenship functions as a complementary affiliation rather than a replacement. Education and the media cultivate awareness of shared ecological and technological systems without erasing cultural distinction.
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The fourth element concerns power. Institutions are distributed across functions, protected by rotating leadership, independent oversight, and digital transparency. Authority remains limited, visible, and divisible.
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The fifth element concerns tempo. Transition unfolds through intermediary arrangements: enforceable climate compacts, standardized digital governance, pandemic protocols, and regional unions experimenting with cross-border welfare.
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Across these arrangements sovereignty becomes layered, welfare foundational, identity dual, and governance proportionate to vulnerability.
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What emerges is not a utopian design, but a navigable movement from fragmentation toward coherence—one by which organization becomes possible.
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EPILOGUE
This essay was written from within a condition of recognition rather than from a position of outcome. It observed the emergence of planetary interdependence as a factual state—environmental, technological, and economic—without assuming that recognition itself would compel coordination, restraint, or shared action. The proposal rested on the visibility of scale, not on the expectation of response.
What has since become clearer is not that the planetary condition was misread, but that its implications were overestimated. Interdependence does not suspend political habit. Global exposure does not dissolve national calculation. The existence of shared risk does not neutralize mistrust, nor does it override the logic by which States preserve autonomy through delay, insulation, or selective engagement.
The absence that now stands out is not empirical but structural. A planetary condition can be acknowledged while responsibility remains local, fragmented, or deferred. Systems adapt to crisis without reorienting their priorities. Cooperation becomes conditional, provisional, or transactional, rather than binding. What persists is adjustment, not alignment.
This does not negate the planetary frame. It clarifies its limits. The world does not move toward coherence by recognition alone. It moves through negotiation, withdrawal, recalibration, and self-protection—often simultaneously. Balance, when it appears, is not designed; it is reached unevenly, through constraint rather than consensus.
Seen from this angle, A Planetary Proposal records a moment of clarity rather than a program. It marks the point at which global exposure became unmistakable, without presuming that such exposure would produce a corresponding form of action. What follows in later essays does not extend that proposal. It narrows the lens, attending instead to the conditions under which recognition stalls, agency fragments, and adjustment replaces resolution.
Ricardo Morín Teratological Topographies Series One: CIVIC AGENCY Oil On Linen Quadtych: Each panel: 14 by 18 by 3/4 inches 2009
Ricardo F. Morín
November, 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor, NY, NY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This essay examines conditions frequently distorted by ideology, moral inheritance, or historical narrative. Questions of sovereignty, occupation, revolution, exile, and national identity are often debated through claims that appeal to absolutes—religious entitlement, historical grievance, or revolutionary legitimacy. These claims differ in language but share the same structure: they place a single idea over civic realities of people whose lives are structured by such narratives.
To address what is obscured by these narratives, the essay turns to a structural factor that cuts across these differences: civic agency, understood as the capacity of people to shape the conditions of civic life through their participation, representation, and lawful processes. When civic agency is removed—whether through external control, internal authoritarianism, or deterrence directed at displaced populations; the form of the constraint may change, but the civic effect remains constant.
This essay does not compare political histories. It examines how State power, in its various configurations, regulates civic life. It considers how ideology obscures this regulation and how populations experience the consequences of decisions in which they have little or no role. The goal is not to reduce political conflict but to call attention to the structures that determine whether freedom is possible or remains beyond reach.
ABSTRACT
This essay will argue that the most reliable way to understand situations that appear politically incompatible—such as Palestinian statelessness and Cuban authoritarian sovereignty—is to examine the structural absence of the civic agency that defines both. Although the forms of constraint differ, the civic condition comes together: the State, whether external or internal, restricts the capacity of the population to shape its own civic life. By analyzing how State regulation limits participation, suppresses representation, or fragments jurisdiction, this essay will show how civic agency becomes the central measure of freedom. It will further examine how ideological narratives, policies of deterrence, and migratory pressures hide this structural reality. The aim is not to adjudicate political claims but to bring to light the conditions under which civic life can be formed, protected, or denied.
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Every attempt to understand political life must begin with the recognition that populations do not experience freedom as an abstraction; they experience it through the structures regulating their civic existence. These structures determine how decisions are made, how authority is exercised, and whether or not people can participate in shaping the conditions for their own lives. Civic agency is therefore not an ideal but a condition that either exists or not. When it is absent, freedom appears as a formal claim rather than a lived condition.
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Civic agency consists of three components: participation, representation, and lawful process. Participation allows individuals and communities to influence public decisions. Representation provides continuity between the governed and the governing body. Lawful processes ensure that authority is exercised within defined limits. When any of these components is removed, the people lose their capacity to shape the civic environment they inhabit. This loss may occur by external regulation, internal authoritarianism, or policies reducing civic life to a set of restrictions that diminishes a shared domain.
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The absence of civic agency can take different forms. A population may be governed by institutions that do not recognize the communities’ sovereignty and thus leave civic agency subject to regulations that the people have no significant role in its shaping. Alternatively, a people may inhabit a sovereign State that suppresses political pluralism, restricts lawful dissent, and monopolizes institutional authority. In both cases, the civic condition is suppressed: the people are without the ability to influence the rules that govern them.
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The Palestinian case illustrates the first form. Multiple authorities regulate movement, territory, and public life without providing unified jurisdiction or sovereign protection. Decisions made by external States define daily existence and leave the population without consistent civic rights or a stable institutional framework. The absence of sovereignty is not only territorial but civic; this absence takes away the mechanisms by which participation and representation are possible.
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The situation with Cuba represents the second form. Although the State possesses sovereignty, it concentrates political authority within a single institutional apparatus and restricts lawful avenues for dissent, competition, or structural reform. Citizens live under a system that maintains political continuity by restricting avenues for participation. Sovereignty prevails; civic agency is limited.
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Palestine and Cuba differ, of course, in history, structure, and origin; yet they align in one respect: the State, whether external or internal, restricts participation in ways that make civic agency unattainable. The absence of agency is the common element that marks the civic condition beneath political narratives. This absence also provides a framework through which populations that experience different forms of constraint are to be understood without conflation.
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Ideological narratives frequently align with existing distributions of power. Religious entitlement asserts that land is secured by divine mandate rather than civic protection. Revolutionary rhetoric proclaims that political authority is justified by historical struggle rather than accountability. Both forms of narrative elevate an absolute over the civic realities of the population. They replace agency with allegiance, and they interpret restriction as necessity, and not as a failure of representation.
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Migration provides a third lens through which the limits of civic agency become visible. People leave their countries when the structures regulating their lives collapse or become uninhabitable. They seek stability, protection, and the ability to rebuild civic participation in new surroundings. Yet policies of deterrence in host States often mirror the pressures that displaced them. The new States restrict the migrants’ movements, their access to social institutions, and narrow the possibilities of belonging to a civic order. These policies do not reproduce the original dilemma, but host States reintroduce the experience of living under rules that they cannot influence.
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For many asylum seekers, these restrictive measures narrow the distance between the pressures that forced their departure and the pressures they encounter upon their arrival, a shift that makes stability hard to distinguish from exclusion. European examples such as Denmark and the United Kingdom reveal how deterrence is used to discourage asylum without acknowledging the civic vacancy it creates. The United States employs similar policies at its borders and presents deterrence as an instrument of order, which leaves migrants suspended between exclusion and unresolved civic status.
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The structural argument is not that these situations are equivalent, but that the absence of civic agency creates a civic condition transcending political differences. Populations ruled without participation, governed without representation, or confined within systems that restrict lawful processes experience freedom as external to their civic environment. This condition cannot be explained by ideology because ideology addresses identity, justification, or legitimacy—not agency.
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Understanding civic agency clarifies the difference between political claims and civic realities. Sovereignty does not guarantee freedom; revolution does not guarantee participation; religious entitlement does not guarantee protection. Civic agency exists only when people can shape the conditions that guide them. When this becomes impossible, the people do not inhabit a civic order but a regulated space.
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When civic agency becomes the measure through which political life is understood, ideological narratives lose their authority, and the structure of constraint becomes visible. This visibility does not resolve conflict but reveals the conditions under which freedom can either emerge or remain unapproachable. Civic agency is where the possibility of civic life begins and where its absence becomes structurally apparent.
Ricardo Morín Triangulation 8: Lens of Procedural Incoherence 22″ x 30″ Watercolor and wax pencil on paper 2007
Ricardo Morín
November 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Abstract
This essay examines how procedures governing the use of force, the classification of conflict, and the articulation of self-defense diverge from declared principles in three areas of U.S. foreign policy: the Trinidad maritime strike, the war involving Ukraine and Russia, and the conflict involving Israel, Palestine, and adjacent countries. The analysis traces how inconsistencies arise when official language does not align with established norms, when criteria shift across comparable circumstances, and when the stated basis for action changes according to political need rather than procedural coherence. The comparison highlights how these divergences contribute to instability and weaken interpretive clarity across international affairs.
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The Washington Post report titled “‘Kill them all’: Hegseth’s battlefield rhetoric shaped Trump-era strike” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/28/hegseth-kill-them-all-survivors-boat-strike/) describes a U.S. military operation near Trinidad in which a small vessel believed to be transporting narcotics was struck after being misidentified. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a spoken directive “to kill everybody,” and the strike killed most individuals on board. When surveillance identified two survivors clinging to debris, a second strike was ordered that killed them as well. Subsequent explanations to Congress presented the follow-on strike as an effort to remove a navigational hazard, even though the presence of survivors had already been confirmed.The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), whose opinion later justified the actions as part of an armed conflict with designated narcoterrorist groups, introduced a legal classification that departed from the facts presented in the initial reports. These elements create a single set of materials from which procedural coherence can be examined.
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The procedural irregularity becomes visible once the chain of actions is placed in order: an unverified assumption about the vessel’s identity, a directive that treated all occupants as combatants, a second strike executed after survivors were identified, and a later legal justification grounded in a classification that recast the operation as part of an armed conflict. Each step relied on a different principle—assumption, directive, reinterpretation, and reclassification. The divergence among these principles reveals how procedure shifted to accommodate the desired framing rather than guiding the action itself. This shift does not imply motive; it demonstrates how administrative language can detach from the criteria that normally govern the use of force.
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A similar procedural disjunction appears when U.S. positions regarding Ukraine and Russia are placed alongside the Trinidad case. The United States publicly condemns Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian civilians and cites violations of distinction, proportionality, and accountability under the laws of armed conflict. Yet discussions about scaling back support for Ukraine have introduced a reversal in which the procedural commitments used to justify condemnation of Russia are not consistently applied when considering the implications of reducing assistance to a State defending its sovereignty. The shift from emphasizing legal norms to weighing political costs illustrates how procedures can be reshaped by circumstances, even when the stated principles remain unchanged. The inconsistency does not rest in the declarations themselves but in the procedural reversals that appear when support for Ukraine becomes entangled with broader strategic calculations.
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The conflict involving Israel, Palestine, and neighboring states such as Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen reveals another form of procedural divergence. The United States affirms Israel’s right to self-defense and stops short of recognizing Palestine’s claim to self-determination in equal procedural terms. The same criteria invoked to justify one party’s actions do not extend to the other party’s pursuit of sovereignty, even though both claims arise within a single territorial and political circumstance. This asymmetry becomes more pronounced when regional attacks are considered: the procedures invoked to justify Israeli strikes in response to threats from Iran, Lebanon, or Yemen differ from those applied to Palestinian actions, despite operating within an interconnected region where the consequences of one engagement affect all others. The divergence reflects a procedural evasiveness that stabilizes one position while it leaves another without an articulated pathway toward recognition or resolution.
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When the three circumstances—the Trinidad strike, the shifting position toward Ukraine and Russia, and the procedural asymmetry in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—are examined together, their differences do not obscure the common pattern. In each case, established procedures that ordinarily govern the use of force or the recognition of sovereignty diverge from the principles publicly invoked. In Trinidad, the divergence takes the form of reclassification after the fact. In Ukraine, it appears as a reversal in how the principles of civilian protection and territorial integrity are applied. In Israel and Palestine, it emerges as a partial application of the right to self-defense without a corresponding recognition of the procedural requirements associated with sovereignty. The alignment across cases arises from the way procedures shift to accommodate political needs rather than guiding action according to a stable set of criteria.
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This alignment does not rest on the equivalence of the conflicts but on the consistency of the procedural departures. Each case shows how the same vocabulary—armed conflict, self-defense, sovereignty, and civilian protection—operates differently when applied to different actors. The procedures attached to these terms change according to circumstance rather than principle. As a result, the meaning of each term becomes unstable. What counts as an armed conflict in Trinidad, a sovereign defense in Ukraine, or a legitimate use of force in Gaza depends not on a uniform procedural standard but on the political frame selected in each instance.
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A coherent foreign policy requires that procedures governing the use of force, recognition of sovereignty, and classification of conflict remain consistent across situations. The Trinidad strike shows how procedures can be rearranged after the fact to protect the narrative of an operation. The evolving position on Ukraine demonstrates how procedural commitments can weaken when strategic considerations gain priority. The treatment of Palestinian claims and Israeli self-defense reveals how procedures can be selectively applied within the same region. Together, these inconsistencies demonstrate how the absence of procedural coherence reduces interpretive clarity and complicates the relationships on which international stability depends.
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The examination of these cases through a single lens does not equate them; it identifies the procedural incoherence that appears when the principles governing the use of force, recognition of sovereignty, and classification of conflict do not align with the actions taken. The result is a field of international affairs in which the stated basis for action varies according to circumstance, and in which procedural language adapts to political needs rather than providing a stable standard for decision-making. The inferences that follow are left to the reader, who can judge how the departure from procedural coherence shapes the credibility of U.S. conduct abroad.
There are lives that seem to recapitulate the destiny of a nation, as if history, in search of renewal, gathers its scattered promises into one mortal form. María Corina Machado stands within that rare order of beings in whom blood, memory, and conviction converge—not as privilege, but as burden. She was not merely born into Venezuela’s republican lineage; she was summoned by it. The call that first thundered through the assembly halls of Caracas in 1811—when its independence was declared and its first republican constitution conceived—still vibrates beneath her name.
Her ancestry reaches into the first pulse of the Republic. From the Rodríguez del Toros, who set their signatures beneath the Act of Independence, to the Zuloaga engineers who electrified a nation, hers is a genealogy woven into the civic arteries of Venezuela. It is a lineage that chose service over title, innovation over indulgence, and fidelity to the law over the ease of silence. In that tradition, the notion of freedom is not an abstraction—it is inheritance, obligation, and vocation. It is the thread that binds a people to their conscience.
When the institutions that once defined Venezuela began to crumble, when legality became theater and words lost their weight, Machado stepped into the void with the gravity of someone aware that retreat was impossible. Her defiance was not theatrical—it was ancestral. Every gesture, every refusal to submit, bore the quiet authority of history fulfilled. She spoke as one who understood that to preserve dignity in times of humiliation is the purest form of resistance. There is, in her manner of being, that rare synthesis of intellect and steadfastness that defines the moral personality of a nation at its best—lucid, unbending, and human.
Yet today, her adversary is not one but many. Before her stands not only a narco-state that has hollowed out Venezuela’s sovereignty, but a fractured opposition—an archipelago of parties and personalities bound less by principle than by convenience. Factionalized, transient, and transactional, these groups have transformed plurality into pretext and compromise into commerce. Many have learned to live off the dictatorship they denounce. They negotiate freedoms for themselves even as the country sinks deeper into captivity. Against that duplicity, Machado’s presence has become a moral indictment: her clarity exposes their corruption; her endurance, their opportunism.
Around this internal disarray, the world circles in watchful appetite. Venezuela’s vast natural wealth—its oil, gas, gold, and rare minerals—has become the prize of criminal networks and multinational investors alike. Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, each cloaked in rhetoric of salvation, compete not to free the country but to secure a share of its exhaustion. Behind the diplomatic masks of assistance lies the same calculation: that chaos can be profitable, that a nation weakened by hunger and fear can be managed more easily than one restored to its sovereignty. This, for twenty-five years, has been Venezuela’s condition—a field of material, moral, and human extraction; its people scattered, its institutions despoiled, its memory pawned to the highest bidder.
In such a landscape, María Corina Machado stands as both witness and counterpoint. Her struggle has never been for power but for coherence—for the recovery of a civic language capable of naming what has been lost. To speak of law, truth, and justice amid pervasive corruption is to resurrect meaning itself. Her voice has become the thread that gathers the nation’s scattered conscience, reminding Venezuelans that dignity cannot be negotiated, and that no foreign savior will restore what only citizens can redeem.
To see her walk through the streets, welcomed not by luxury but by faith, is to glimpse a country remembering itself. She has become, willingly or not, the mirror through which Venezuelans rediscover their own moral architecture: decency, courage, compassion, and an unextinguished appetite for truth. In her endurance, the long-interrupted dialogue between people and Republic resumes.
The Nobel Peace Prize, bestowed upon her, is therefore not a coronation but a recognition—an acknowledgment that her struggle transcends the moment and becomes emblematic of the human spirit’s refusal to yield to despair. In awarding her, the world affirms that Venezuela’s republican dream—born in fire, preserved in conscience—still breathes through one of its daughters. It is the dream of a nation that believes peace must be built not upon submission, but upon moral clarity; not upon silence, but upon the unwavering voice of the citizen.
What María Corina Machado represents is more than opposition to tyranny. She is the embodiment of continuity—of the idea that a Republic, like a soul, survives so long as there remains one person willing to bear its weight with dignity. Her ascent is not accidental—it is the return of an ancient promise. In her composure, Venezuela recognizes itself once more: wounded yet unbroken, luminous in defiance, faithful to the destiny inscribed in its first act of freedom.
Although the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize (2025) to María Corina Machado brings joy and honor to those who still believe in the possibility of a democratic Venezuela, it also reveals a far more complex reality; one that demands reflection.
The international press has yet to grasp the dream surrounding the supposed liberation of Venezuela from a narco-state. Venezuelans continue to wait indefinitely for liberation. Beneath this hope lies a deeper bondage: the nation’s territory continues to be bound to multinational interests (Chinese, Russian, American, and others) driven not by ideology but by competition between investors and criminal networks. For all of them, a prolonged conflict in Venezuela is convenient; it serves as a bridge to a regional metamorphosis and justifies the expropriation of the natural resources of the country; it aims at consolidating hemispheric dominance by the multinational interests. The situation in Venezuela is therefore not only political but also structural; it is an experiment in which sovereignty is traded for access and resistance itself becomes a form of captivity.
The crisis in Venezuela reveals a moral conflict in modern politics: how suffering can both be exploited and perpetuated when comprehension yields to fantasy. The dream of liberation has become one of the nation’s most persistent fantasies. Behind the language of emancipation lies a silent convergence of global interests; each one sustains the very conflict it claims to oppose. In Venezuela, disorder legitimizes intervention and chaos provides the pretext for extraction. In this sense, Venezuela is not merely a nation in distress but also a stage upon which the grammar of domination continues to be enacted through the vocabulary of deliverance
The challenge is no longer to imagine freedom as an external rescue but to comprehend how dependence disguises itself as salvation. Only comprehension (the act of seeing beyond grievance and beyond consolation) can pierce the veil of liberation and restore meaning to the very idea of freedom.
To my brother Alberto, whose persistence sustained this reflection and made these pages possible.
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By Ricardo Morin
July 29, 2025
Abstract
This essay examines the fragmentation of Venezuelan national identity amid a prolonged crisis of State failure. It argues that the collapse of institutional sovereignty, the entrenchment of foreign authoritarian influence, and the marginalization of native citizens from civic and economic life have not only hollowed out the republic but have also fractured the symbolic cohesion necessary for shared civic identity. Through a reasoned analysis of foreign entanglement, cultural displacement, and the moral cost of dispossession, the essay contends that Venezuelan identity has become a contested act of memory and resistance. The argument proceeds not from political activism but from a civic and ethical perspective on national dissolution.
Section I: Losing the Nation: Identity in a Failed State
National identity is not an abstraction. It is a lived sense of coherence that binds individuals to a shared history, a common language, and a civic project. In functional States, this identity is sustained by stable institutions of governance, the continuity of law, and the everyday experience of participation in a protected civic order. When a State collapses—through authoritarian control, institutional decay, and the disfigurement of sovereignty—its people do not merely lose services or rights. They begin to lose their place in the world.
As Michel Agier observes, “when institutions that once guaranteed rights, protection, and civic recognition collapse—such as courts, elections, or access to public services—citizens can become internally exiled: physically present, but stripped of belonging”—of any sense of inclusion.
This disintegration is not caused solely by economic collapse or political repression. It has been compounded by the regime’s calculated alignment with foreign authoritarian powers, which have embedded external interests deep within the nation’s economy and territorial administration. Through negotiated dependencies—whether in extractive industries, infrastructure, surveillance, or military cooperation—the Venezuelan State has relinquished control over strategic industries and assets. In doing so, it has not only compromised national sovereignty; it has reordered the social and cultural hierarchy of belonging.
As Louisa Loveluck has documented, these foreign enclaves operate as “parallel structures of control and privilege,” where loyalty to external powers displaces the traditional role of State industries such as in oil and mining resources (Loveluck, “Foreign Control and Local Collapse in Venezuela’s Border Zones,” The Washington Post, 2019).
According to David Smilde, this delegation of sovereign functions to authoritarian allies has transformed the State apparatus into an instrument of regime survival rather than a vehicle of national representation (Smilde, “The Military and Authoritarian Resilience in Venezuela,” Latin American Politics and Society, 2020).
The result is a deep psychological rupture. Arjun Appadurai describes this condition as a form of “identity disanchoring,” in which cultural detachment renders citizens unable to recognize themselves in their historical present (Modernity at Large, 1996).
When a nation’s institutions no longer reflect its people, and when its future is shaped by foreign imperatives, Venezuelanness becomes less a civic reality and more a memory under siege. What is lost is not only territorial—it is existential. Hannah Arendt warned of this condition with stark clarity: the loss of the right to have rights begins when one no longer belongs to a political community capable of guaranteeing them security (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951).
Section II: Authoritarian Alliances and Economic Infiltration
Venezuela’s transformation into a failed State has not occurred in isolation. Its authoritarian trajectory has been reinforced by a calculated strategy of international alignment with other regimes operating outside the norms of democratic accountability. These alliances—chiefly with Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey—have provided the Maduro regime not only with political legitimacy and technical support, but have also enabled the gradual outsourcing of national functions and resources to foreign control (cf. Ellis 2018, 49–56).
These alliances are transactional: the Venezuelan State forfeits sovereignty in exchange for survival. Chinese loans secured by oil reserves, Russian stakes in energy infrastructure, Cuban intelligence operations embedded in the military and civil apparatus, and Iranian ventures in mining and logistics have together displaced native Venezuelans from critical sectors of the economy (cf. Trinkunas 2015, 3–6; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, 197–198).
In parallel, private and informal business networks—often tied to these foreign interests—have taken root in local markets, at times displacing or outperforming historical domestic producers. This economic infiltration has a dual effect. It distorts the allocation of national resources, diverting wealth and opportunity away from the general population toward a narrow class of regime beneficiaries and their foreign patrons (cf. Corrales 2020, 212–215). And it reconfigures the geography of power: entire regions, especially those rich in oil, minerals, or strategic positions, have come under the functional control of external actors or militias under foreign protection (cf. Romero 2021, 88–91).
In such contexts, Venezuelans do not merely feel excluded from their economy; they experience it as something alien—managed, exploited, and secured by those whose loyalties lie elsewhere. The result is a corrosive alienation. A population that once saw itself as a beneficiary of a national project now confronts the reality of an extractive system in which their labor, land, and culture are no longer valued on their own terms. The economy ceases to be a platform for collective progress and becomes a zone of foreign extraction, protected by repression and organized through impunity (cf. Loveluck and Dehghan 2020; López Maya 2022).
In this environment, the question of identity becomes inseparable from the loss of agency. To be Venezuelan under such conditions is to be subordinated within one’s own country.
Section III: Cultural and Social Displacement
The dissolution of identity in a failed State extends beyond political and economic structures; it reaches into the cultural and social fabric of everyday life. In Venezuela, the displacement of native citizens is not always physical—though mass emigration has marked the national experience. The institutions, customs, and even public spaces that once embodied a shared civic identity are being emptied out, repurposed, or replaced by structures that no longer reflect Venezuelan values or priorities [cf. Salas 2019, 45–47].
Public education, for instance—once a source of national pride and social mobility—has been systematically dismantled. In its place, ideological indoctrination and partisan loyalty have become criteria for access and advancement [cf. Human Rights Watch 2021]. The result is not only the degradation of knowledge and opportunity but even the politicization of childhood itself. Similarly, cultural production—formerly diverse, expressive, and regionally vibrant—has withered under censorship, economic collapse, and the withdrawal of public support for the arts [cf. Ávila 2020, 119–124].
What remains is either trivialized as propaganda or silenced altogether. The result is a cultural silence, where shared narratives are undermined and the cultural life of the nation is reduced to slogans and spectacle. Meanwhile, the influx of foreign interests and their social infrastructure—contract workers, commercial complexes, private security, parallel institutions—has introduced new cultural norms and loyalties into local environments, particularly in border areas and resource-rich zones [cf. Rodríguez and Ortega 2023].
These changes are often subtle: signage in unfamiliar languages, imported goods replacing local ones, new patterns of exclusion in access to services or employment. But over time, they alter the character of a place, displacing not only people but the meanings those places once held. This form of displacement is disorienting because it operates within everyday life. It renders Venezuelans strangers in their own markets, their own schools, their own land. It unravels the mutual recognition that makes coexistence possible.
When communities no longer share a common point of reference—whether legal, linguistic, or moral—they lose the cohesion needed to sustain identity as something lived and affirmed. The rupture is not dramatic; it is slow, cumulative, and deeply damaging [cf. Arendt 1951, 302–306]. In such a context, cultural resilience becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Identity, once reinforced by public participation and pride in collective achievement, begins to retreat into nostalgia or fracture along lines of class, exile, or ideological survival. It becomes reactive rather than generative—something to defend rather than to build.
Section IV: Dignity and the Struggle to Belong
“Venezuela: Freedom in the World 2024” by Freedom House offers updated empirical data and analytical context regarding the decline of political rights and civil liberties in Venezuela, with particular attention to authoritarian consolidation and State control.
At the heart of national identity lies the human need for dignity: the certainty that one’s life is acknowledged, one’s labor valued, and one’s voice able to contribute to a shared future. In today’s Venezuela, that dignity has been systematically undermined. The collapse of institutions, the degradation of public life, and the influence of foreign entanglements distorting the national economy have created a climate in which the average citizen no longer feels seen or protected by their country. This is not merely a political failure, but a fracture in the ethical foundation of the nation. As Emmanuel Levinas warned, “dignity is not a legal category but the response of the face of the other, who calls and obliges us” (Levinas 1982).
When a government no longer rules on behalf of its people, but rather to ensure its own permanence and serve external patrons, civic inclusion becomes conditional. Loyalty is demanded, not earned. Dissent is criminalized, not heard. Citizenship, far from offering protection, becomes a liability. In such a system, dignity is not merely denied—it is redefined through fear, dependency, and silence. Here, Hannah Arendt’s warning comes to pass: “the loss of human rights begins when the right to have rights is lost” (Arendt 1951).
This leaves Venezuelans—both within and beyond the country—suspended between dispossession and resistance. Many continue to fight for what remains: organizing locally, teaching despite educational collapse, feeding neighbors in the absence of public services, safeguarding memory in the face of propaganda. These acts are heroic, but they also respond to abandonment. They attest to the resilience of the people, but also to the void where the State should be.
For those in exile, the loss is often twofold: the loss of a physical home and the loss of a living context. Cultural reference points no longer match daily experience. One’s accent becomes a marker of displacement. The passport becomes a barrier more than a right. And yet, exile can also sharpen awareness of what has been lost—and what must be preserved. Thus, identity persists not through affirmation of a functioning nation, but through refusal to forget one. In the words of Edward Said, “exile is not simply a condition of loss, but a critical way of being in the world” (Said 2000).
Even so, dignity requires more than memory. It requires restoration: of institutions, of justice, of a civic space where Venezuelans may once again participate as equals. Until such restoration is possible, the struggle to belong will continue to define Venezuelan identity—not as a static inheritance, but as a sustained refusal to surrender what remains of the nation’s moral core.
Section V: A Word for the Dispossessed
To speak of dispossession is to name not only what has been taken but also what continues to be denied: the right to shape one’s future within a framework of justice, belonging, and shared meaning. In Venezuela, dispossession has unfolded through a deliberate dismantling of sovereignty—first by internal corruption, then by foreign entanglement. What remains is a scattered people, a fragmented territory, and an identity under immense pressure. As Achille Mbembe has noted, “dispossession acts not only upon bodies but also upon the collective imaginaries that sustain life in common” (Mbembe 2016).
And yet, dispossession is not the end of identity. The absence of a functional State does not erase a nation’s moral memory. The language, traditions, civic values, and aspirations that once shaped Venezuelan life have not vanished: they have been driven underground, carried into exile, or preserved in the hearts of those who remember. “Language is the house of being,” said Heidegger, and where it is kept alive, a form of belonging endures (Heidegger 1959).
The task now is not only to resist, but to rebuild: to articulate a vision of Venezuelanness that rejects both cynicism and forgetfulness.
This cannot be done through nostalgia alone. Nor can it be deferred to future generations without commitment. It begins with the refusal to normalize what is not normal: the foreign occupation of national resources, the criminalization of dissent, the denial of opportunity, the devaluation of citizenship. It continues in the quiet labor of preserving language, history, and dignity wherever that remains possible—whether in classrooms, in exile, or through the written word. And it gains strength through solidarity: among those who stayed, those who left, and those who bear both destinies.
Under these conditions, Venezuelan identity is not a fixed inheritance but an act of resistance. It is the assertion that dignity is not negotiable, and that a people cannot be permanently replaced by alliances of convenience and control. The recovery of the nation will take time and may require forms not yet imagined. But it will depend, above all, on the preservation of civic spirit—one that knows what has been lost and refuses to let it be forgotten.
Epilogue *
As Venezuela’s history unfolds in waves, the struggle between unity and fragmentation, idealism and authority, repeats itself—not only in the corridors of power but also in the private lives of those who live with its consequences. Power, in its many forms, tests the very fabric of the nation, yet the quest for balance remains elusive. Venezuela remains gripped by a profound humanitarian crisis, with millions deprived of basic healthcare and nutrition, according to the “World Report 2024” by Human Rights Watch. [1] The country now has the highest rate of undernourishment in South America, with 66% of its population in need of humanitarian aid and 65% having irreversibly lost their means of livelihood. Despite repeated promises of reform and amnesty, entrenched power structures have prevented meaningful change and perpetuated what is widely regarded as an authoritarian and corrupt regime. External interventions, primarily diplomatic and economic sanctions, have been frequent, yet they have failed to compel any substantive transformation.
Political theory once held that the spread of democracy would secure peace among nations. [2] The ordeal for Venezuelans suggests the converse: peace recedes where democracy is hollowed into the temporality of chaos. Although such theories do not directly address the persistence of autocracies, the Venezuelan case highlights how regimes strengthened by internal control and by strategic autocratic alliances with external powers can withstand both internal unrest and external pressure.
In Venezuela, theoretical insights find concrete expression in how democratic institutions—elections, legislatures, and courts—are repurposed to entrench authoritarian control. Through staged electoral processes, constrained legislatures, and politicized judiciaries, these regimes suppress dissent, manage perception, and deflect external accountability. Legitimacy transforms from a mandate of the people into a mechanism for the endurance of autocratic power.
While the path forward remains uncertain, the crisis is no longer merely political—it is systemic, embedded in the very fabric of Venezuela’s history. The resolution of this crisis requires more than political turnover or external intervention; it requires an acknowledgment of the historical inheritance that has shaped the nation’s mistrust and dysfunction. The foundations of governance have long been built on conflicting forces, and any potential for change begins with an awareness of this legacy. A coordinated strategy that integrates economic support, diplomatic engagement, and grassroots democratic movements may provide short-term relief, but it cannot resolve what is ingrained. True transformation requires a cultural reckoning—an internal shift in consciousness that confronts the very forces that have enabled autocratic rule. Yet without a profound internal unity—a cultural awakening capable of overcoming centuries of inherent contradictions—the possibility of such transformation may remain distant, though not extinguished.
[2] Azar Gat, “The Democratic Peace Theory Reframed,” World Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 58, No. 1, October 2005, 73-100.https://www.jstor.org/stable/40060125
Améry, Jean: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. (A philosophical and existential reflection on suffering, exile, and the loss of belonging. The essay draws on his idea that there is no greater violence than being stripped of a place in the world to return to, which becomes a moral axis in the Venezuela of the exodus.)
Appadurai, Arjun: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. (Appadurai introduces the concept of “identity disanchoring” to describe the cultural unmooring brought about by globalization, which disrupts symbolic continuity between past and present. He is cited to explain the subjective rupture in contexts of cultural loss and displacement.)
Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951. (Foundational study on rootlessness, denationalization, and the right to have rights. Her conceptualization of stateless refugees directly informs the argument about the loss of belonging as a form of ontological expulsion.)
Ávila, Rafael: La cultura sitiada: Arte, política y silencio en Venezuela. Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2020. (Ávila examines how censorship, economic precariousness, and institutional control have drastically reduced independent artistic production in Venezuela. He is cited to support the claim that cultural diversity has been replaced by an expression conditioned by power and subsistence.)
Corrales, Javier: Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela’s Authoritarian Leaders Consolidated Power. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2020. (Corrales explains how regime elites have concentrated economic control through informal networks, enabling foreign-backed oligarchies to displace domestic economic actors. Used to support the claim that foreign patrons and loyalists now dominate Venezuelan resource flows.)
Ellis, R. Evan: Transnational Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. (Ellisprovides a comprehensive mapping of how foreign actors—especially from Cuba, Russia, and China—embed themselves in the Venezuelan state. Cited to explain the strategic outsourcing of sovereignty to non-democratic allies.)
Gessen, Masha: Surviving Autocracy. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. (Though centered on the United States, this book articulates general patterns of autocratic behavior—such as the distortion of language, the hollowing of institutions, and the disorientation of those governed—which also apply to the Venezuelan case.)
Heidegger, Martin: Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. (Includes the well-known phrase “Language is the house of being,” which is cited to emphasize the relationship between linguistic continuity and existential belonging.)
Human Rights Watch: “Venezuela’s Humanitarian Emergency: Large-Scale UN Response Needed to Address Health and Food Crisis.” New York: Human Rights Watch, 2019. (H.R.W. detailed report linking the collapse of public services with violations of basic rights and national dignity, highlighting how the humanitarian crisis contributes to the dissolution of identity.)
Levinas, Emmanuel: Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. (Levinas’s ethics of alterity, centered on responsibility toward the irreducible other, underlies the essay’s argument for a politics founded on dignity, not on state identity or calculated reciprocity.)
Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel: How Democracies Die. Nueva York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018. (Levitsky and Ziblatt offer a framework for understanding democratic degradation via institutional capture and foreign alignment. It is referenced to underline the transactional nature of Venezuela’s external alliances.)
López Maya, Margarita: “Economía extractiva y soberanía en disputa: el Arco Minero del Orinoco.” Revista Venezolana de Ciencia Política 45 (2022): 34–49. (López Maya analyzes how mining zones have become semi-autonomous territories controlled by militias and foreign interests, supporting the essay’s argument on geographic alienation and economic fragmentation.)
Loveluck, Louisa: “The Collapse of a Nation: Venezuela’s Descent into Authoritarianism.” The Washington Post, July 2020. (Journalistic synthesis of Venezuela’s structural collapse, including firsthand accounts of economic alienation and the psychological cost of state abandonment.)
Loveluck, Louisa, and Dehghan, Saeed Kamali: “Venezuela Hands Over Control of Key Assets to Foreign Backers.” The Washington Post, 2020. (Loveluck’s and Dehghan’s investigative report documents the privatization and foreign management of strategic Venezuelan sectors. Their report is cited to demonstrate how national industries have been subordinated to external control.)
Mbembe, Achille. Politiques de l’inimitié. Paris: La Découverte, 2016. (Mbembe explores the politics of enmity and the mechanisms of dispossession in late modernity. Quoted to highlight how structural violence targets both material life and the collective imagination.)
Rodríguez, Luis, y Ortega, Daniela: Colonización contemporánea: transformaciones culturales en las zonas extractivas de Venezuela. Mérida: Editorial de la Universidad de los Andes, 2023. (An ethnographic study on the sociocultural effects of foreign investment in mining and border regions, including the introduction of new hierarchies, codes of coexistence, and parallel organizational forms. It is cited to support the argument about the transformation of cultural norms and community loyalties.)
Romero, Carlos A.: “Geopolítica, militarización y relaciones internacionales del chavismo.” Nueva Sociedad 293 (2021): 82–94. (Romero traces how foreign alliances have militarized border zones and reinforced internal authoritarianism. Used to support the claim that power has shifted toward actors whose loyalties lie beyond Venezuela.)
Roth, Kenneth: The Fight for Rights: Human Dignity and the Struggle Against Authoritarianism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022. (Roth examines the moral and civic foundations of dignity, providing context for the argument that Venezuelan identity must now be preserved through resistance rather than state recognition.)
Said, Edward W.: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. (Said explores the experience of exile as an existential and critical condition, beyond mere uprootedness. Cited to support the idea that Venezuelan identity in the diaspora endures not through the affirmation of a functioning nation, but through the refusal to forget.)
Salas, Miguel: Arquitectura y desposesión: Espacios públicos y crisis urbana en Venezuela. Caracas: Editorial Punto Cero, 2019. (Salas examines the transformation of public architecture and space in the context of political and social collapse in Venezuela. Cited to support the idea that shared civic structures are being stripped of their symbolic and communal function.)
Schmitt, Carl: The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. (Theoretical reference on sovereignty, useful for understanding how the Venezuelan regime defines enemies and allies not through legality but through loyalty, thereby reshaping the very meaning of citizenship.)
Shklar, Judith: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. (Shklar examines how political and social exclusion has shaped the meaning of citizenship in the United States. The essay takes up her premise that to be a citizen implies not only legal rights, but effective belonging and recognized dignity.)
Smilde, David: “Participation, Politics, and Culture in Twenty-First Century Venezuela.” Latin American Research Review 52, no. 1 (2017): 157–65. (Analyzes the cultural impact of political polarization and exclusion in Venezuela, and how identity is formed in contested civic spaces.)
Trinkunas, Harold A.: “Venezuela’s Defense Sector and Civil-Military Relations.” Washington: Brookings Institution Working Paper, 2015. (Trinkunas examines the entrenchment of Cuban and Russian influence in the Venezuelan military. Cited to explain the redefinition of sovereignty under foreign advisory presence.)
Observations On Perception 