This article examines the role of business interests in shaping the structures of global environmental governance between the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992. It demonstrates how the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) managed to establish itself as a key partner for the UN while articulating a neoliberal vision that emphasized the market mechanism and business self-regulation as sources of environmental governance. The article provides empirical evidence that the ICC institutionalized business self-regulation in environmental governance and contributed to the very definition of the concept of sustainable development as we know it today.

This article assesses the “business of development” in the post-colonial age, when bilateral and multilateral aid regimes offered businesses new opportunities. It uses the case study of Britain and the European Economic Community (EEC), from Britain's accession to the EEC in 1973 to the early 1980s, to demonstrate that the British government viewed multilateral aid instruments, in particular the European Development Fund (EDF), as offering commercial opportunities for British firms. Based on records of the EEC, business associations, and the French and British states, the article analyzes business-state relationships between national governments, corporations, and supranational institutions. As the UK government tried to redirect EEC aid toward places where its firms had the most to gain, it met the opposition of other member states and European institutions as well as the disinterest of its own businesses.

During the 1970s, governments increasingly expressed concerns about the loss of revenue through the use of tax havens by both individuals and corporations. This article explores a covert international working group (the Group of Four) set up between France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1969 in response to such concerns. At regular meetings, officials exchanged information gathered by their respective tax authorities in auditing multinational companies. In the 1980s, under increasing pressure from governments in a now much more hostile climate to tax authorities, the Group’s work shifted away from multinationals and toward more general, technical questions. The history of the Group of Four illustrates the importance of the 1960s and 1970s as a period for regulating economic actors and the impact of broader circumstances on the success or failure of anti-tax avoidance measures.

In the late twentieth century, the European Union (EU) emerged as a global leader in setting environmental protections, including vehicle emissions standards. But member state consensus around environmental rules did not come easily, and the regional norms eventually set by the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, had complex origins. This article argues that common emissions standards were ultimately achieved through a public-private process during the program to create the Single European Market in the 1980s and 1990s. For regional policymakers, standards were key to achieving an internal car market and strengthening the auto industry's global competitiveness; for many European carmakers and their transnational business associations, common norms could facilitate economies of scale and level the playing field. The “liberal environmentalism” born out of this convergence of interests produced common standards that fell pragmatically between the greenest member states and those most invested in protecting their national champion firms.

Scholarly and public interest in the nexus of capitalism and global governance has intensified in recent years. The persistence of economic inequality, the rise of populism, the backlash against globalization, the Covid-19 pandemic and supply chain fragility, the resurgence of open conflict in Europe, and the urgency of the climate change crisis have only drawn further attention to the relationships of markets and trade to norms and institutions. Solutions to many of these challenges, which are closely tied to capitalist dynamics, require interventions on a scale that only institutions of global governance can provide. At the same time, these challenges compromise governance institutions by making them susceptible to private influence. Moreover, critics have raised alarm about the ways some forms of global governance – such as powerful philanthropic institutions, private summitry forums, and international organizations that enforce economic globalization on nation-states – evade democratic accountability. Such developments have prompted scholars to analyze the entangled histories of capitalism and global governance and the evolution of the global economy and its regulation as well as collective efforts to provide for the well-being of humans and their environments.

When it comes to events that have marked turning points in the relationship between global governance and business history, I have focused on the role of international crises to understand the forces shaping relations between firms, states, and global governance frameworks. Such an approach stems from the fact that I am primarily an historian of international relations, and much of my research and writing is concentrated on European and global history in the period from about 1880 to 1950. For me, the origins and course of the two world wars and the Cold War have been as important as crises of capitalism, such as the Great Depression.

In April 1959, editor-in-chief of Time magazine, Henry Luce, spoke vehemently to the World Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, encouraging business leaders “to unite [their] energies on something which is really fundamental—fundamental to civilization and economic progress. That something is the advancement of the rule of law.” Together with lawyers, business leaders had “the responsibility to see that the rule of law prevails in every corner of the business world.” Luce insisted that international trade needs “legal certainty” and business leaders would do better by focusing less on “certain rules and regulations” and more on “basic and universal rules under which all business could prosper.” One of the proposals he asked the audience to endorse was German banker and politician Hermann Abs's Magna Carta (a formative proposal to enact what is known today as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS).

It is common for historians to focus their attention on turning points in the past. The risk with this is that it overstates how dramatic change was and the extent of stasis and stability in between those turning points, at its most extreme form in notions of punctuated equilibriums. We need to remember the importance of continuities across those turning points and transitions in order to understand the roots of change and have a more nuanced picture of the nature of change. This is as valid for the relationship between firms, governments, and global governance frameworks as it is for any other historical subject.

The twentieth century is a fascinating time to follow the relationship between global governance and firms because of the persistent tension between principles of mass democracy and private ownership and control. It is possible to narrate the entire century as a series of contestations between firms and international organizations. At times, firms have had the upper hand. At other times, the principle of popular sovereignty has threatened the self-perceived rights and prerogatives of business. In my own work, I have homed in on ruptures at two main points.

Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and nothing is perfect.

The international institutions that govern global capitalism—the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wield considerable power over the flows of trade and finance, and thereby the nation-states that participate in it. (And opting out is nearly impossible.) Those institutions were created in July 1944, amidst World War II, with the laudable objectives to restore global trade and capital flows, protect national sovereignty, and promote peace through interdependence. In short, these institutions represented the solution to the failures of interwar international governance—more specifically, the failure of the League of Nations to stem macroeconomic instability or the Second World War.