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But my problem with Rawls is that deriving justice as such is obsolete. Or, as he points out himself, only relevant during a constitutional crisis or the formation of a new nation.
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There are large stretches of the globe that have not achieved nationhood as yet, and others in which constitutional crisis is virtually constant. Even in the homelands of parliamentary democracy, the idea of the nation is up for grabs: in the UK there is great trouble with Englishness, and what it would mean to be English. Elsewhere, problems are even more acute.
In many lands it not the moral community that is lacking, but the structural institutions that would give that community voice. I would agree that you cannot impose the institutions top down: indeed many of the current problems have their roots in this very mode of proceeding.
But I'll admit that I would not be looking to philosophers from the anglosphere to deal with this kind of question. I'd be looking to the social historians - to Mann and Tilley, for example - to the political anthropologists like James C. Scott or Taussig, or to political sociologists such as Susan Strange. Or to look at Florence's point about how new communication systems have impacted on society and the polity, Manuel Castells or Sennett.
But then philosophy does bleed into these writings. I don't think that there is a single interesting social theorist who has not been influenced by Wittgenstein. Whether she knows it or not.