In the context of the recently proclaimed New International Economic Order, the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) was established by the UN Economic and Social Council in 1975.1 This New York–based organ of the UN Secretariat was created to assist the work of another new body, the Commission on Transnational Corporations, which was charged with negotiating a code of conduct for multinational corporations. In less than two decades, the UNCTC was defunct, and the Commission’s effort to adopt and implement a code of conduct had been abandoned. Yet in 1999, just a few years after the Center was officially disbanded by the General Assembly, multinational corporations reemerged on the UN scene when Secretary General Kofi Annan announced the launch of a new partnership between UN agencies and international business. This new venture, known as the Global Compact, underscored a dramatic shift in the United Nations’ attitude toward multinational corporations (MNCs); the old debates of the 1970s and 1980s about how efficacious a code of conduct might prove in regulating MNC conduct have been replaced by efforts to leverage what Annan described as “the enlightened self-interest of companies” to developmental and social ends.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1731