Invariant Orders on Lie Groups and Coverings of Ordered Homogeneous Spaces

 In this paper we give a characterization of those reductive or solvable connected, not necessarily simply connected, Lie groups which permit a non-degenerate group order. A non-degenerate group ordering on G always defines a pointed generating invariant convex cone W in the Lie algebra of G, but not every such cone arises in this way. The cones that do are called global. To decide whether a given cone is global or not is a difficult problem which for simply connected groups and invariant cones has completely been solved by Gichev. (Received 22 October 1999; in revised form 3 March 2000)