The phrase Global South names an ideological position, Mignolo argues, and it took over from Third World once the Soviet collapse emptied the older label. He tracks the concept back to 1500, when Europe was one civilization among several, alongside China, the Ottoman and other sultanates, the Inca and the Mexica, and had no standing as the West. What followed was the colonial matrix of power, a linked set of controls over economy, authority, knowledge, subjectivity, gender and sexuality, underwritten first by Christian theology and later by secular philosophy, and concealed beneath a story of progress. Reading Carl Schmitt on the nomos of the earth, Mignolo observes that Schmitt describes European global line thinking from a position inside it. He then maps five trajectories now competing for control of that matrix: rewesternization directed from Washington, dewesternization led by East Asia, a reoriented left, the decolonial option, and a spiritual option that declines the split between sacred and secular.