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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.” Moalic Nicolas 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. Moalic Nicolas 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 Moalic Nicolas 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. Moalic Nicolas 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 Moalic Nicolas 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”. Moalic Nicolas 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.