Download Theories of European Integration. Ben Rosamond

Moalic Nicolas
Theories of European Integration
Ch.3-4
Ben Rosamond
Chapter 3-Neofunctionalism
For many, “integration theory” and “neofunctionalism” are virtual synonyms. Neofunctionalism
might be thought of as attempt to theorize the strategies of the founding elites (Jean Monnet and
Robert Schuman) of post-war unity. The approach of Schuman and Monnet represented a direct
rejection of the idealism of the federation movement.
The Monnet method is said to be rooted in an analysis of converging preferences and hard-nosed
self-interest among policy actors in Europe.
The strategy that emerged from building the European communities can be encapsulated by the
following propositions:
-integrated modestly in areas of ”low politics” in the first instance, but ensure these are key
strategic economic factors (coal and steel for example).
-Create a high authority without the distraction baggage of national interests to oversee the
integration process and give it the ability to act as a sponsor of further integration.
-The integration of particular economic sectors across nations will create functional pressures for
the integration of related economic sectors. The consequence is the gradual and progressive
entangling of national economies.
-Deepening economic integration will create the need for further European institutionalization as
more expansive integration will require greater regulatory complexity.
-Political integration is a more or less inevitable side effect of economic integration.
-It follows that this gradual economic integration accompanied by a degree of supranational
institutionalization is an effective route to the creation of a long-term system of peace in
Europe.
In Schuman’ s founding speech of the ECSC (1951, Treaty of Paris), he declared that “The pooling
of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of a common
foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe…The setting up
of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to
provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same
terms, will lay the true foundation for economic unification.”
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The architects of post war integration wished to develop some sort of political unity among states,
particularly between France and Germany. This was to be achieved by economic integration and
purposeful institutions, designed to guide the integration process.
Definitions
Technocracy is, above all, a way of theorizing government and decision-making processes in
advanced industrial economies.
Neofuncionalism (Wikipedia…)
Jean Monnet's approach to European integration, which aimed at integrating individual sectors in
hopes of achieving spill-over effects to further the process of integration, is said to have followed
the neofunctional school's tack. Haas later declared the theory of neofunctionalism obsolete, after
the process of European integration started stalling in the 1960s, when Charles de Gaulle's "empty
chair" politics paralyzed the institutions of the European Coal and Steel Community, European
Economic Community, and European Atomic Energy Community. Neofunctionalism describes and
explains the process of regional integration with reference to how three causal factors interact
with one another: (a) growing economic interdependence between nations, (b) organizational
capacity to resolve disputes and build international legal regimes, and (c) supranational market
rules that replace national regulatory regimes.
The neofunctionalist scholars laid down the premises of framework for the study of regional
integration: Two or more countries agree to work for integration in a given economic sector
(sector a). To accomplish this task more effectively, they agree to appoint a supranational
bureaucracy, a “high authority” to use the parlance of this time, to oversee operations. While de
the integration of sector a achieves some of the supposed benefits, the full advantage of
integration will not be achieved unless cognate economic sectors are also drawn into the
integrative web. In any case, the integration of a creates functional linkage pressures for related
for related sectors b and c to become part of the game. The high authority will become a key
sponsor of further integration by pointing out the relationships that exist between a, b and c.
Haas and Lindberg were the founders of the Neofunctionalist theory.
The concept of “spillover” was therefore invented by the neofunctionalsits: it refers to the way
in which the creation and deepening of integration in one economic sector would create
pressures for further economic integration within and beyond that sector, and greater
authoritative capacity at the European level. For instance, the full integration of the coal and
steel sectors would not be accomplished without integration of other sectors, such as transport in
order to facilitate the movement of raw materials, products and so on… Further on, the free trade
area led to more extensive collaboration in order to create stable exchange rates, and therefore
developed monetary policy cooperation. This partly explains the transition from ECSC to EMU.
The establishment of a free trade area was carried out with the intention of generating pressures
for the establishment of a customs union, a common market and monetary union. Therefore,
politics would follow economics.
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However, the automatic of spillover in economics required a measure of political activism. It had
to be given a push in the right direction, from a higher authority. However, the spillover
hypothesis seemed to suggest that integration was a linear, progressive phenomenon; that once
started, dynamics would be set in place to continue the momentum.
Lindberg was the first to explore the idea that progress in integration could actually deter further
integration. It seems that neofunctionalists had underestimated the importance of nationalism as
a prevailing sentiment in European politics. The term spill back was then invented: it refers to an
outcome pattern which is characterized by a decrease in sectorial scope or institutional capacities
or both. This theory seems to explain the hiccups faced by the European integration process in the
1960s.
To be accomplished, political spillover would require a process of loyalty transference.
According to Haas: “Political integration is the process whereby political actors in several distinct
national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities to a new
center, whose institutions posses or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states.”
Haas initially defined “loyalties” in terms of the attributes of political community, so that a
population is “loyal to a set of symbols and institutions when it habitually and predictably over
long periods obeys the injunctions of their authority and turns to them for the satisfaction of
important expectations.
Political community was defined as a “condition in which specific groups and individuals show
more loyalty to their central political institutions than to any other political authority, in a specific
period of time and in a definable geographic space” (Haas)
How will this transfer of loyalty occur?
Juliet Lodge claims that that if an organization provides for a given welfare need, then this will
automatically register in the consciousness of the beneficiaries. This analysis however
overestimates the extent to which to which faceless apolitical agencies could be capable of
commanding loyalty. Communities have arisen historically where loyalties are owed to an
identifiable sovereign or to concrete symbols rather than to abstract ideas.
Beyond Europe: neufunctionalism as a general theory of regional integration
Neofunctionalism arose as an attempt to explain the dynamic process of integration in Europe, but
Europe was seen very much as a case study of the sorts of processes that could operate in any
regional setting.
Haas indentifies three background conditions that made for successful integration: pluralistic
social structures, substantial economic and industrial development and common ideological
patterns among participating units. These all existed in Western Europe and the European
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experience also taught that the momentum for integration could be maintained where
supranational agencies were given tasks that facilitated the upgrading of common interests.
But do background conditions exist for regional integration? Some argue that integration is more
or less inevitable by-product of modernity.
Haas and Schmitter devised a three stage model to allow for the investigation of conditions during
the integration process. Establishing the status of the various conditions would allow for
predictions to be made about the prospects for “automatic politicization”.
Background conditions
Conditions at the time of
economic union
Process conditions
-Size of unit
-Possible governmental
purposes
-Decision-making style
-Rate of transactions
-Pluralism
-Elite complementarity
-Rate of growth of transactions
-Powers and functional of
-Adaptability of governmental/private
new regional-level institutions
actors
Haas and Schmitter performed this evaluation for then contemporary regional integration
schemes and concluded that only in the EEC were the chances of “automatic politicization” good.
However, they continued to assume that integration occurred in all cases through the
politicization of technical-economic tasks via mechanisms of spillover.
On the other hand, as Joseph Nye pointed out, spillover might not be the only integrative dynamic
and so looking for conditions conductive to “politicization” might be at best misplaced and at
worst Euro-centirc. He argued that spillover was a limited explanatory tool, even in the West
European case, where it appeared to account for the formative years of the ECSC, but was less
successful at explaining the politics of the EC in the mid 1960s. Nye developed the idea that
background conditions are indeed important, but they must be subdivided into structural and
perceptual categories. Structural conditions include the extent to which the units (states) in an
integration scheme were symmetrical, the capacity of member states to respond and adapt, levels
of pluralism within member states and the degree to which the values of economic policy elites
were complementary. The perceptual category refers to the importance of subjective
interpretation of objective context. He enumerates three:
-perceptions of the equity of the distribution of benefits deriving from integration.
-the actors ´perception of their external situation was important.
-if the costs of integration were seen to be either low or exportable, then the chances of deeper
integration were advanced.
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The neofunctionalist approach was subject to numerous criticisms. The first was alleged
implausibility. It was argued that the empirical evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the continued
relevance of states and that there was no reason to suppose that this state of affairs would
change. The second emerged from a more ethical-normative set of concerns. Here the argument
was that nation-states are the best vessels (such as justice, liberty). To dissolve them would be to
jeopardize those freedoms.
Chapter 4-Backlash, Critique and Contemplation
The integrative momentum, in the 1960s, was mirrored by a reassertion of nationalist sentiment
at elite level in Western European politics. The pivotal figure in this nationalist resurgence was
Charles de Gaulle, the French President since the inauguration of the V th Republc in 1958. De
Gaulle´s interaction with the Communities was both acrimonious and disputive. He was largely
responsible for the vetoing of the British membership application in 1963 and Gaullist objections
to proposals for institutional reform lay at the heart of the so-called “empty chair crisis” when
France withdrew from European Community business for a portion of 1965, until the “Luxembourg
compromise”. By common consent this facilitated national vetoes in the Council of Ministers in
circumstances where “vital national interests” were deemed to be at stake. The accord is usually
read as a moment when the fundamental premises of the integration experiment were
renegotiated heavily in favor of the member-states and when the principle of
intergovernmentalism trumped that of supranationalism.
The tensions manifest in the Western European system in the early 1960s could be explained
partly by the fact that member-states had not been able to arrive at a consensus on the
appropriate location of their new supranational entity in the global order. Tension was also
explained by the fact that the stakes of integration were raised by incursions of supranationality
into areas of controversy. This led Hoffmann to draw on the distinction between “high” and “low”
politics to explain why integration was possible in certain technocratic and uncontroversial areas
and why it was likely to generate conflict in matters where the autonomy of governments or
components of national identity were at stake. What came to be called “negative integration”
(Pinder, 1968), the removal of barriers to the operation of markets, fitted in the politics category
because it would not threaten the position of national elites, and thus imperil particular definitions
of “vital national interests”. In areas of key importance, where national interests were deemed to
be at stake, Hoffmann argued that “nations prefer the certainly, or the self-controlled uncertainty
of the untested blender”. High politics was virtually immune from the penetration of integrative
impulses. On the other hand, governments were actually prepared to cooperate in the realm of
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low politics because it was a way of retaining control over areas where intersocietal transaction
was becoming the norm.
High politics ----) States are not prepared to compromise their sovereignty.
According to the neofinctionalists, the logic of integration implied that nationalism would wither
away, not only because it was an anachronism in the post-ideological world of technocratic
management, but also because supranational sentiment would begin to infect national
consciousness.
The functional process was used in order to “make Europe”; once Europe began being
made, the process collided with the question: “making Europe what for?”.
Hoffmann
Both the development of the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the commitment to enact
Economic and Monetary Union within a specific period can be seen as instances where member
states willingly surrender control over issues of central importance to national sovereignty.
Hansen argued that neofunctionalists had made three theoretical errors which, when rectified,
would yield an altogether more intergovernmental account of the integration process:
-A collective denial of the high-low politics problem.
-A failure to place European integration experience into appropriate international perspective.
-The refusal to accept that the existence of supranational institutions was not necessary to the
achievement of mutual economic gains in a common market. Economic gains could just as easily
arise from a system coordinated by sovereign governments.
For Hansen, there simply was not enough explanatory power in neofunctionalism to account for
the events shaping the EC since the 1950s. Hansen argued that neofunctionlaism could explain low
politics, but it could not say anything about the interaction between high and low politics. Nor
could it generate productive ideas about the interaction between high and low politics. In many
ways, argued Hansen, neofunctionalists drew inappropriate conclusions from their premises. For
instance, societal pluralism might actually prevent spillover.
The intergovernmentalist school emerged in the early 1970s, led by Alan Milward as a
counterbalance of the neofunctionalist school.
R. Harrison has argued that “neofunctionalism might, in the last analysis, be summed up as neoMarxian in the very loose sense that it assumes that economic imperatives will impose themselves
on the political arrangements of society”.
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Throughout the 1960s, neofunctionalists thought seriously about how to incorporate the
troublesome obstinacy of governmental actors in the face of functional pressures and how
precisely low-level economic integration could become politicized.
Haas noted several limitations to the theory:
- First, the transferability of the theory to non-European cases of integration was in doubt because
of neofunctionalism´s deep roots in the analysis of processes of social change and decision making
in plurasitc industrialized societies.
-Second, neofunctionalism suffered seriously from the “dependent variable problem”. It was
simply impossible to establish accurately what a successful prediction might be, given that the
theory had a highly ambiguous notion of the terminal condition of integration.
The dependant variable problem was deeply complex. Haas estimates that it could be agreed that
the end-state of integration was a supranational community, then it might be possible to achieve
such an outcome without the means described by neofunctionalism, in which case the latter
would be falsified. Also, the problem for integration theorists was that while terminal conditions
had been advanced, they could at best be speculative ideal types. In other words, integration
theory was trying to explain something that did not yet exist and whose existence could only be
postulated.
By the mid-1970s Haas had declared integration theory “obsolescent”. Some of “integration
theory´s core concepts did appear to possess considerable explanatory power, but it was no
longer appropriate given the conspiracy of the “real world” events and developments in the social
sciences to conduct integration theory as a self-contained intellectual pursuit.
Conclusion:
The debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s suggested two conclusions about the analysis of the
EC, the net effect of which was to cast serious doubt on the helpfulness of the term “European
integration”. The first was that the EC was usefully thought of as a political system in the making.
The second was that “integration theory” could not really be sustained as a separate branch of
International Relations.