When the finance ministers of the world’s seven largest rich economies met in Chantilly, France last week, they had a tense discussion about reforming multinational corporate taxation. US officials were peeved at the French hosts for enacting a national sales tax on the local business of global tech groups such as Google and Facebook. Whether Americans are right to see the unilateral tax move as a raid on their companies, it has clearly added impetus to G7 efforts to reform international tax rules.

The obvious lesson here is that one country going it alone can force otherwise elusive co-operation. The less obvious, but even more important lesson, is that nation-states retain much more unilateral power than we have been trained to believe.

For the longest time, multinational corporations have been allowed to get away with intelligence-insulting tax wheezes, which were no less obnoxious for being perfectly legal. (Remember the funny bit of Irish tax law that allowed tech companies to incorporate subsidiaries in Ireland that were residents of nowhere for tax purposes?) We were also told that fixing the taxation of capital in an era of globalisation could only work if everyone agreed on it — and the political establishment across the western world suggested that such agreement would be very hard to achieve.

So when the French government simply decided to go ahead and tax the tech giants, and Spain and the UK announce their intention to follow suit, their citizens are entitled to react by saying: “Now you tell us?” It turns out that when a state runs out of patience — Paris says it will remove its tax once there is a satisfactory international agreement — it has more power than many used to think.

What goes for taxes holds more broadly: what was deemed unthinkable becomes thinkable in a pinch — witness the 2013 bank debt writedowns in Cyprus or calls for carbon border adjustments on EU imports by incoming commission president Ursula von der Leyen. The alleged impotence of the state looks like a bluff.

That claim was at least as big a part of the legacy of the 1990s as the rules-based world order now under threat. Today’s politics is often billed as a backlash against globalising liberalism. But it is closer to the truth to see it as a reaction to the way technocracy took the place of politics, institutional design substituted for policymaking and restraint was often preferred to the active wielding of power.

The result was a kind of political fatalism — not to say defeatism — which was sometimes cynically encouraged by the argument that “there is no alternative”. This learnt helplessness in the face of inequality and stagnation helped to fuel the rejection of establishment parties around the world, more than any original animus against globalisation.

Populists — Donald Trump, Brexiters, Italy’s League — have succeeded by calling the establishment’s bluff. “Take back control” and “Make America great again” are not literally calls to break up the liberal world order. Taken on their face (but also taken at their most profound) they are an admonishment to make use of the state’s power, dismissing procedural niceties.

In practice, such politicians use state power for murky ends, including to remove much-needed restraints on what else they can do. But we should separate their specific actions from the demonstration that state power exists and can be used.

It is a salutary if unintended consequence of the rise of strongman populism to remind the rule-worshipping internationalists among us how much discretionary power the state still has. If the state is back, that can be a good thing, as the French tax move shows. A more political use of state power may be just what the liberal order needs.

That requires centrist politicians to move out of their incrementalist comfort zone and pursue policies that measure up to the scale of our problems. The challenges include the overhanging burden of past mismanaged economic crises and looming climate change disruption in the future. Populist snake oil from the right or the left will not solve these. Neither will centrist tweaks.

To do their job (and to stay in their jobs) mainstream politicians must build a centrist radicalism. That does not mean giving up on institution-building and a rules-based order. Quite the opposite. But it does mean using state power to the full measure the rules afford (including, as France has, to improve the rules themselves).

The EU, too, has something to learn in this regard. It is not a state, but it has much state-like power. Yet the bloc can sometimes seem less effective than the sum of its parts. Politically hard decisions are too often shunted off to institution-building exercises or rules-based procedures that are supposed to do politicians’ work for them.

But power is politics, and not all the work of politicians can be substituted for by rules. Besides, right now, rules and institutions need the active support of politicians exercising their authority to uphold them.

The EU need not become any more like a state — but it needs to act more like one. Will Ms von der Leyen build the “political commission” Jean-Claude Juncker promised but never delivered? Paradoxically, the best hope for a rules-based world is for the EU to feel a bit less hemmed in by rules.