There are two broad theories about the economic roots of the backlash against globalisation. The first, and familiar one, emphasises distributional conflict: Loss of manufacturing jobs, rising inequality, wage stagnation, and fears of cultural displacement. Globalisation produced aggregate gains, but it did not compensate its losers. The task, therefore, was political management and redistribution: Rebuild welfare states, cushion shocks and restore legitimacy. There is no fundamental transformation in state-capital relations; rather, politics failed to keep markets socially embedded.

The second theory, more conspiratorial and likely a competitor rather than a complement, argues that the backlash reflects a structural transformation in capitalism itself. Technological change, culminating in artificial intelligence, has altered the interests of capital in ways that make the old globalisation model less attractive. The open liberal order has not primarily collapsed because of cultural resentment or even inequality. Those have always been longstanding features of capitalism. It is, rather, that AI requires reconfiguration of the strategic alignment between states and capital.

The technological effects of AI, its implications for jobs, are much discussed. But what is palpable already is the way it is altering institutional possibilities globally. In the era of manufacturing, capital benefited from distribution across geographies. Firms arbitraged wage differentials, fragmented supply chains, and used the credible threat of exit to discipline both labour and governments. As Karl Polanyi once suggested, states were increasingly embedded in markets. Capital mobility constrained public power. Globalisation was not merely an ideology; it was grounded in a vision of production.

It looks like AI may shift this calculation. First, as is obvious, frontier AI........

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