Any advantage that politicians see in attending the World Economic Forum are these days weighed against the disadvantage of being seen to attend. Brexit has kept Theresa May away from Davos this year. The gilets jaunes protests have persuaded Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, to give it a miss. Both leaders are too busy grappling with crises born in a backlash against globalisation to visit a jamboree for business elites.

Of western Europe’s three most powerful states, only Germany is represented by the head of government. In a sombre speech on Wednesday, Angela Merkel warned of brittleness in the international rules-based order. She pledged to defend the “global architecture” but warned also that reform is essential to win back legitimacy in the eyes of people who feel financially insecure, left behind, and who turn to extremists for redress.

This is a familiar diagnosis, even in Davos, but there is not much consensus on remedies. The forum itself can hardly advertise itself as a place of antidotes to nationalist demagoguery when its keynote speaker this year was Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new far-right president. Last year that role was taken by Donald Trump. Both were given sycophantic receptions, yet these men embody the problem that Mrs Merkel identified. They are not interested in healing social division when stoking grievance is the means by which they take power.

There is no mystery over the policy areas that need most urgent attention: the distributional mechanisms – progressive taxation and public investment – that functioned as social stabilisers through the second half of the 20th century. Partly the cause is ideological aversion to any kind of state intervention, partly the problem is the capacity of multinationals to shop between national jurisdictions and deprive governments of revenue. There are non-economic features of popular discontent, most prominently in hostility to immigration. But the cultural backlash against globalisation is inseparable from inequalities that can be addressed through extra spending and by tackling injustice through the tax system.

There will not be any progress on those fronts at Davos. It is not a place where politicians coordinate policies as a counterweight to the might of big business. But without such coordination national governments are diddled by the hyper-mobility of global capital. The competition to secure investment easily becomes a race to the bottom in terms of workers’ rights, pay and tax receipts. That is why there is immense soft power in the EU’s single market. Alignment of rules on a continental scale allows for more meaningful regulation of multinational behaviour, as has been demonstrated by robust European commission action against tech giants such as Google and Apple on matters of fair competition and unpaid tax.

In British politics, there is a myth that “Europe” shrinks national sovereignty. So entrenched is it that MPs sometimes struggle to conceive of Brussels as a place where nation states’ power is enhanced. But they will find it out soon enough if Brexit goes ahead, when the effects of political and economic detachment from the European project become clear. A delegation of Conservative ministers, including the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and international trade secretary, Liam Fox, are passing through Davos this week, where they will make the now familiar pitch that Britain is open for business. What they mean, in reality, is that Brexit Britain, having rashly given up its seat in the most powerful rule-making chambers of Europe, will be ever more at the mercy of global capital.