The liberal order: holed below the waterline or a ship that we can rebuild at sea?

This chapter reads illiberal nationalist backlashes against the liberal order as a reaction to Modernity and its inbuilt bias towards a cosmopolitan universalism that subjects the local and the particular to rational critique and so threatens particularistic identities established in concrete communities. A (world) society, organised through the logics of legality and economics, builds an empire of law and reason that restricts politics, de-emphasises time and place, leaving many powerless and open to the predations of populists who promise to give them back control. On a charitable reconstruction, the liberal order, especially in multi-level configurations like the EU, might successfully organise the interactions of law, politics and expertise in an increasingly factually interdependent world, but only if they respect our historically-contingent choice to pursue democratic self-determination primarily through national political communities. This necessitates ongoing national legal independence, even as they manage its external effects and enable cooperation with others to achieve what it cannot alone.