The aim of this book has been to restate and develop the original neofunctionalist theory as an approach for explaining outcomes of EU decision-making and to assess the usefulness of the revised neofunctionalist framework in explaining (1) the emergence and development of the PHARE programme, (2) the reform of the Common Commercial Policy and (3) the communitarisation of visa, asylum and immigration policy.

The analysis has indicated the general utility of neofunctionalist insights as a theoretical basis for such an assessment. However, for an adequate understanding of EU decision-making in the above cases, a number of original neofunctionalist assumptions had to be clarified, dropped and reformulated. Taking early neofunctionalism as a starting point, the revised framework departs from it in several ways: a more explicitly ‘soft’ constructivist ontology has been formulated (and combined with the ‘soft’ rational-choice ontology of Haas's neofunctionalism) along with a more equal ontological status between structure and agents. Integration is no longer viewed as an automatic and exclusively dynamic process, but rather occurs under certain conditions and is better characterised as a dialectic process, i.e. the product of both dynamics and countervailing forces. In addition, instead of a grand theory, the revised approach is understood as a wide-ranging, but partial, theory. Moreover, the ‘end of ideology’ and ‘unabated economic growth’ assumptions, which were particularly time sensitive, have been buried.