Globalization facilitated and intensified economic, cultural, and political ties across national borders. This resulted in a more open world offering significant opportunities for those participating in global economic exchange. However, as to be expected, socio-economic change of such magnitude and complexity has also resulted in new challenges, be it with regard to the global environmental cost, social disparities, or structural changes creating burdens on people who could not adapt to them. Associated with the enormous expansion of corporate activities, there were also cases of illegal and illegitimate corporate acts. Observers who focus on the negative aspects of globalization have the impression that the world is suffering from a capitalism that is increasingly contemptuous of human rights, destructive of the environment, and harmful to democracy.1 This capitalism, in the view of many authors, appeals to the basest human instincts: greed and lack of consideration if not ruthlessness with regard to the needs of the community. For them it is inherent to a capitalist system that immoral actions and selfishness are rewarded. As they see it, transnational corporations, in particular, unscrupulously exploit a situation in which the nation state’s monopoly on regulatory authority has been softened up by globalization and there is global competition for optimal investment conditions. Protesting this development and asking for more and sharper regulation is, in the eyes of a growing number of people in modern societies, a legitimate form of self-defense against what they see as a global social and environmental epidemic from which only a few privileged profiteers stand to benefit while the vast majority of people suffer negative consequences. In parallel with the development of this view, many countries are witnessing an erosion of trust in the state and its competence to correct, let alone prevent, distorted social and ecological developments. Precisely when people are longing for a “strong state,” there is a decline in trust in the state’s ability to be strong.