ABSTRACT
Founded in 1600, the East India Company not only established trading routes between Britain, India and China; it also effectively ruled part of India. Since multinationals cross the boundaries of nation-states, proposals to use international organizations to control them gained prominence in the 1970s. The International Labour Organization (ILO) was seen as a suitable organization to establish an international monitoring of multinationals, since trade unions played a central role in its tripartite structure. Moreover, it had a long history of setting international norms. The last important venue for the debate on establishing international control of multinationals was the United Nations, and in particular the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which represented the interests of the South. The European Community obviously appeared as a more efficient framework to promote a socially oriented regulation of globalization not only because of its semi-federal features, but also because of its smaller membership.
