Who Makes the Rules?

There is a growing consensus that economic development alone will not result in democratization, universal values, and just societies. Investments in global governance seem necessary. But the discussion about global governance has often falsely featured the idea that there can be obvious joint solutions for obvious common problems. In fact, different actors pursue strikingly different, and often conflicting, versions of global governance. This paper explores the ongoing struggle for the governance of the global economy, featuring the competing proposals of transnational corporations and unions. This controversy has recently been transnationalized. The well-known activities of nationally based actors regarding their own governments, and the lobbying activities of international umbrella organizations regarding international organizations, are now complemented by transnational activities of nationally based actors. It is those new transnational actions that the paper focuses on, using recent conflicts between U.S.-based unions and Transnational Enterprises in the Americas, Asia, and Europe as the backdrop for a discussion of the contribution of such actions to the development of international values and norms. The paper argues that such contribution is necessarily limited because of the highly voluntaristic quality of both the corporations' and the unions' actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]