of analysts, particularly North Americans, consider that we are seeing the end of the post-war liberal order. And they attribute liberal crisis to two fundamental factors: 1) the frustration of a significant part of American and European society with the results of economic globalisation; 2) the growing challenge to Western hegemony, primarily from China. Our suggestion here, however, points in the opposite direction: that the supposed crisis of ‘liberal order’ is a direct and inevitable result of the expansion and success of the inter
authority, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying out and the new cannot be born’ ( Gramsci, 1971: 276 ). The same is true of the current ‘interregnum’, during which a struggle for meaning, narrative and reason is constitutive of the struggle for power that will eventually give birth to ‘the new’. Humanitarianism has been a defining feature of liberal order. But it is not simply a pillar of liberal ideology. Indeed, essential to any universalist politics of the human , its liberal character is contingent. Amid the crisis of