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Analyzes Kofi Annan's Global Compact (GC) & points out the good that such an organization is capable of accomplishing. The GC is a voluntary initiative intended to induce corporate change through identifying & promoting good businesses practices. Some critics claim that the GC should be a legally binding regulatory arrangement. Great logistical & financial requirements for such a regulatory agency would exceed the UN's capacity & would be opposed by the business community. The GC is a learning forum, & hopefully will become a standard reference through an on-line learning bank available to all corporations seeking to increase their social responsibility. Corporations would use the GC in order to avoid public embarrassment, such as Shell received for its dealings in Nigeria. R. Larsen

Der Artikel geht der Frage nach, durch welche Theorien die weltweiten Beziehungen zusammengehalten werden.Waren dies traditionellerweise Realismus und Liberalismus (Machiavelli oder Hobbes gegen Kant) so erwuchsen daraus in den 80er Jahren dieses Jahrhunderts Neorealismus und neoliberaler Institutionalismus. Seit einem Jahrzehnt gilt der Sozialkonstruktivismus in den internationalen Beziehungen nicht nur als Kritik an den vorherrschenden neo-utilitaristischen Ansätzen (unter denen der Neorealismus und der neoliberale Institutionalismus zusammengefaßt werden) sondern als eigenständiger Ansatz zur möglichen Lösung der Frage nach den weltweiten Beziehungen (SWP-Drh)

Social constructivism in international relations has come into its own during the past decade, not only as a metatheoretical critique of currently dominant neo-utilitarian approaches (neo-realism and neoliberal institutionalism) but increasingly in the form of detailed empirical findings and theoretical insights. Constructivism addresses many of the same issues addressed by neo-utilitarianism, though from a different vantage and, therefore, with different effect. It also concerns itself with issues that neo-utilitarianism treats by assumption, discounts, ignores, or simply cannot apprehend within its characteristic ontology and/or epistemology. The constructivist project has sought to open up the relatively narrow theoretical confines of conventional approaches—by pushing them back to problematize the interests and identities of actors; deeper to incorporate the intersubjective bases of social action and social order; and into the dimensions of space and time to establish international structure as contingent practice, constraining social action but also being (re)created and, therefore, potentially transformed by it.

Argues that deepening the relationship between NATO and the European Union is more critical to the long-term future of the transatlantic security community than immediate NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe.