ABSTRACT
Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are the “Leviathans” of globalizing capitalism and agents of development. They played a major role in the development of their home-states in Europe and North America as well as in host-states of (former) colonial countries. This chapter historicizes both the notion of development and the roles MNEs played in economic development in West African countries during the first globalization and the ensuing deglobalization until the 1960s, and how the host-states tried to define and foster this role by means of economic policies. It also reconstructs the discourses of the Nestlé and Ciba-Geigy/Novartis managements, two Switzerland-based MNEs, with respect to corporate social responsibility, during the second globalization of the last third of the 20th century. The conceptual perspectives are Marxist and systemic. From different points in space, time, and theory, the chapter demonstrates what role MNEs were supposed to play with regard to development in exemplary home- and host-countries in the global North and South, and how these expectations changed from the first to the second globalization.
