The year that could be

European Union, sent a shudder through cosmopolitan elites across the West.As many rushed to stockpile goods in the event of a “no-deal” Brexit, I remember being asked whether the sight of half-empty supermarket shelves reminded me of Albania under Hoxha (they did not). Yet with hindsight—after US President Donald Trump’s first election, a global pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and Trump’s return to the White House—even die-hard opponents of Brexit might now concede that their panic was somewhat overblown.Or was it? Next year, Brexit will mark its tenth anniversary—certainly an important symbolic milestone in the current age of globalization.

The referendum signaled a return to a world in which states are increasingly isolated from one another, institutions are held hostage to the arbitrary will of individuals, and the rule of law seems irreversibly in decline.The year ahead is unlikely to be different. The Brexiteers’ call to “take back control”—once carrying at least a veneer of intellectual honesty, insofar as it invoked legitimate debates about sovereignty—has degenerated into a full-blown conspiracy narrative.

Control, we are now told, is impossible, owing to the ever-present threat posed by foreigners and those deemed incapable of “integrating.”The future seems to offer only a blend of dread and paranoia. What else is to be expected in a world where the only reliably expanding markets belong to the military sector, and where technological innovation appears increasingly devoted to perfecting the art of mutual destruction? Amid all this, where can one still find hope?In his 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” the German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to identify a