Теории на европейската интеграция

Chapter 1
Theories of European Integration
Chapter Overview
The dominant approaches to understanding the early phase of European integration came from
international relations (IR). In particular, the study of integration was dominated by the compet-
ing approaches of neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism. Although neofunctionalist theory
neatly fi tted events in the 1950s and early 1960s, subsequent events led to its demise and the
rise of intergovernmentalist explanations. While theorizing European integration has moved on
signifi cantly from these early approaches, much of what followed was either framed by this
debate or developed as a rejection of it. The debate about whether the EU is characterized by
intergovernmentalism or supranationalism still informs much of the academic work on the
subject.
‘International theory’ has been too readily written off by contempor
ary writers seeking to off er
theoretical treatments of the EU . . .
(Rosamond 1999: 19)
The signing of the Treaty of Paris in April 1951 by the governments of Belgium,
France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands (Chapter 6, p. 92) began
the process commonly referred to as European integration (see Insight 1.1). This proc-
ess has meant that the economies of participating states, and subsequently other areas,
have been increasingly managed in common. Decisions previously taken by national
governments alone are now taken together with other governments, and specially cre-
ated European institutions. Governments have relinquished the sole right to make
legislation (national sovereignty) over a range of matters, in favour of joint decision
making with other governments (pooled sovereignty). Other tasks have been delegated
to European institutions.
It was something of a surprise to academic theorists of IR when governments in
western Europe began to surrender their national sovereignty in some policy areas.
For the fi rst half of the twentieth century, the nation state seemed assured of its place
as the most important unit of political life in the western world, especially in Europe.
As such, the process of European integration constituted a major challenge to existing
theories and generated an academic debate about the role of the state in the process.
The two competing theories that emerged from IR to dominate the debate over early
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developments in European integration were neofunctionalism (Haas 1958; Lindberg
1963) and intergovernmentalism (Hoff mann 1964; 1966).
Before discussing these two main positions in the debate, it is necessary to consider
the intellectual context from which the idea of European integration emerged. Below
we look fi rst at the functionalist ideas of David Mitrany on how to avoid war between
nations, then at the ideas of the European federalists, and fi nally at the ‘federal-
functionalism’ of Jean Monnet. We then turn to look fi rst at neofunctionalism and
then at intergovernmentalism, before looking at two later contributions to this debate:
liberal intergovernmentalism and supranational governance.
The Intellectual Background
To understand the ideas that fed into the fi rst attempts to theorize European integra-
tion, it is useful to start with one of the approaches that was infl uential after the
Second World War about how to avoid another war. This ‘functionalist’ idea, which
Insight 1.1 European Integration
European integration has a number of aspects, but the main focus of Chapter 1 is on politi-
cal integration. Ernst Haas (1968: 16) provided a defi nition of European political integra-
tion as a process, whereby:
political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyal-
ties, expectations and political activities tow
ard a new center, whose institutions pos-
sess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states. The end result of a
process of political integration is a new political community, superimposed over the
pre-existing ones.
Implicit in Haas’s defi nition w
as the development of a European federal state. More cau-
tiously, Lindberg (1963: 149) provided a defi nition of political integration as a process, but
without reference to an end point:
political integration is (1) the process whereby nations forego the desire and ability to
conduct foreign and k
ey domestic policies independently of each other, seeking
instead to make joint decisions or to delegate the decision-making process to new cen-
tral organs; and (2) the process whereby political actors in several distinct national
settings are persuaded to shift their expectations and political activities to a new
center.
The fi rst part of this defi nition refers to two ‘intimately related’ modes of decision making:
sharing and delegating. The second part of the defi
nition refers to ‘the patterns of behav-
iour shown by high policy makers, civil servants, parliamentarians, interest group leaders
and other elites’ (Lindberg 1963: 149), who respond to the new reality of a shift in political
authority to the centre by reorientating their political activities to the European level.
THEORY
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5
was particularly associated with the writings of David Mitrany, informed the United
Nations movement. It was a theory of how to achieve world peace, rather than a the-
ory of regional integration, and it took a very diff erent approach to the question from
the European federalists, who wanted to subordinate national governments to an over-
arching federal authority. The ideas of both the functionalists and the federalists were
brought together in the ‘functional-federalism’ of Jean Monnet, which in turn pro-
vided one important source of intellectual inspiration for the neofunctionalist theory
of European integration.
Mitrany and Functionalism
David Mitrany (1888–1974) was born in Romania, but spent most of his adult life in
Britain and the United States. He was not a theorist of European integration. His con-
cern was with building a Working Peace System, the title of his Fabian pamphlet (Mitrany
1966; fi rst published 1943). For Mitrany, the root cause of war was nationalism. The
failure of the League of Nations to prevent aggression prompted debate about a new
type of international system even before the outbreak of the Second World War. For
those who blamed the failure of the League on its limited powers, the response was the
development of an international federation. In other words, the League had not gone
far enough and the same mistake should not be repeated: henceforth, nations should
be tied more closely together.
Mitrany did not agree with the idea of federation as the means of tying states
together. He opposed the idea of a single world government because he believed that it
would pose a threat to individual freedom. He also opposed the creation of regional
federations, believing that this would simply reproduce national rivalries on a larger
scale. Any political reorganization into separate units must sooner or later produce the
same eff ects; any international system that is to usher in a new world must produce the
opposite eff ect of subduing political division.
Instead of either of these possibilities—a world federation or regional federations—
Mitrany proposed the creation of a whole series of separate international functional
agencies, each having authority over one specifi c area of human life. His scheme was
to take individual technical tasks out of the control of governments and to hand them
over to these functional agencies. He believed that governments would be prepared to
surrender control because they would not feel threatened by the loss of sovereignty
over, say, health care or the co-ordination of railway timetables, and they would be
able to appreciate the advantages of such tasks being performed at the regional or
world level. As more and more areas of control were surrendered, states would become
less capable of independent action. One day, the national governments would discover
that they were enmeshed in a ‘spreading web of international activities and agencies’
(Mitrany 1966: 35).
These international agencies would operate at diff erent levels depending on the
function that they were performing. Mitrany gave the example of systems of com-
munication. Railways would be organized on a continental basis; shipping would be
organized on an intercontinental basis; aviation would be organized on a universal
basis. Not only would the dependence of states on these agencies for their day-to-day
functioning make it diffi cult for governments to break with them, but the experience
THEORIES OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
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of the operation of the agencies would also socialize politicians, civil servants, and
the general public into adopting less nationalistic attitudes and outlook.
Spinelli and Federalism
A completely diff erent approach to guaranteeing peace was devised during the war in
the ranks of the various Resistance movements. It was a specifi cally European move-
ment, and whereas Mitrany aimed explicitly to depoliticize the process of the transfer
of power away from national governments, federalists sought a clear transfer of politi-
cal authority.
The European Union of Federalists (EUF) was formed in December 1946 from the
war-time Resistance movements. It was particularly strong in Italy, where the leading
fi gure was Altiero Spinelli. Federalism appealed to the Resistance groups because it
proposed superseding nationalism. It is important to bear in mind that whereas in
Britain (and Russia) the Second World War was a nationalist war (in the former Soviet
Union, it was ‘the great patriotic war’), in countries such as France and Italy it was an
ideological war. Resistance fi ghters drawn from communist, socialist, and Christian
democratic groups were in many cases fi ghting their own countrymen—Vichy sup-
porters in France, Italian Fascists in Italy.
While being held as political prisoners of the Fascists on the island of Ventotene,
Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi (1897–1967) produced the Ventotene Manifesto (1941),
calling for a ‘European Federation’. It argued that, left alone, the classes ‘most privi-
leged under old national systems’ would seek to reconstruct the order of nation states
at the end of the war. While these states might appear democratic, it would only be a
matter of time before power returned to the hands of the privileged classes. This
would prompt the return of national jealousies and ultimately, to renewed war
between states. To prevent this development, the Manifesto called for the abolition of
the division of Europe into national, sovereign states. It urged propaganda and action
to bring together the separate national Resistance movements across Europe to push
for the creation of a federal European state.
The EUF adopted the Ventotene Manifesto, and began agitating for an international
conference to be called that would draw up a federal constitution for Europe. This
ambitious proposal was designed to build on what Milward called ‘the wave of hope
for a better world and a changed future for the human race which had swept across
Europe’ and which included an ‘extraordinary wave of enthusiasm for European fed-
eration’ (Milward 1984: 55).
The strategy of the EUF was to exploit the disruption caused by the war to exist-
ing political structures in order to make a new start on a radically diff erent basis
from the Europe of national states. They aimed to achieve a complete break from
the old order of nation states, and to create a federal constitution for Europe. Their
Congress took time to organize, though. It eventually took place in The Hague in
May 1948 (see Chapter 5, p. 8