According to Mrs Mary Robinson the next big international idea is "ethical globalisation".
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights offers an account of it that brings together values, morality, ethics, law and human rights in what she describes as a "new normative cluster", which urgently requires further thought, elucidation - and implementation.
In her speech on a global ethic this week to Tubingen University she has applied these ideas to world trade, AIDS/HIV, poverty, intellectual property rights, the UN's Global Compact initiative on private business enterprises, a permanent forum on indigenous peoples and the world environment.
Her main theme is that if we accept the analysis of the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, that economic globalisation's "integrative logic seems inexorable, its momentum irresistible", then it is essential to find ways it can be made subject to moral and ethical considerations and to respect international legal standards and principles.
Such a perspective makes sense in a world whose interdependence and vulnerability were so dramatically underlined by the events of September 11th last. Amongst other things, they set back the protest movement about market-led globalisation built up in recent years. Based on a rejection of the ways it divides the world into zones of relative prosperity, harsh poverty and enduring conflict, this movement contains several different currents. Most of them would probably agree with Mrs Robinson's diagnosis that globalisation can and should be harnessed to ethical and legal norms and regulation; a vocal minority is more radical, rejecting such a reforming approach on either ecological or revolutionary grounds.
One way or another it is essential that established world leaders should engage with these critics - and this is one of the principal merits of the work Mrs Robinson has been doing. She pays tribute to Mr Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, who during his EU presidency term last year took the initiative with such a dialogue. He coined the phrase "ethical globalisation" after organising a conference bringing together many involved in such debates.
Mrs Robinson concludes with good reason that the values, principles and commitments required to make globalisation ethical are already incorporated in international documents. What is now required is to implement them by refining the capacity of states and legal regimes to deliver on such solemn promises.