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A Revised Theory of Regional Integration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

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Extract

The study of regional integration, of how national units come to share part or all of their decisional authority with an emerging international organization, is one of the areas of political inquiry in which a cumulative research tradition has developed. Previous paradigms are scrutinized critically in new settings; replications are made and even encouraged; new concepts, hypotheses, and measures are suggested and incorporated without obliterating past work. Under these conditions theoretical formalization may play a particularly fruitful role.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1970

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Footnotes

1

Philippe C. Schmitter, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The author acknowledges a major debt to the participants of the Conference on Regional Integration, April 24–26, 1969, many of whose articles appear in this volume. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Larry Finkelstein, Leon Lindberg, and Hayward Alker, Jr. have offered detailed criticisms of an earlier draft which were found useful in the revision. The author also wishes to thank his colleagues at the Instituto para la Integración de América Latina (INTAL) in Buenos Aires who were so generous with their time and so helpful with their criticisms: José Maria Aragão, Natalio Botana, Jaime Campos, Ricardo Cappeletti, John Elac, Enrique Melchior, Felix Peña, Jaime Undurraga, Eduardo White and INTAL's director, Felipe Tami; of course, all of the above are absolved from any responsibility for the ensuing product.

Mr. Schmitter's research in Argentina was supported by an ACLS-SSRC grant and a generous leave of absence from the University of Chicago. In intellectual inspiration this article is part of the International Integration Studies project of the Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley, directed by Ernst B. Haas.

References

1 Haas, Ernst B. and Schmitter, Philippe C., “Economics and Differential Patterns of Political Integration: Projections about Unity in Latin America,” International Organization, Autumn 1964 (Vol. 18, No. 4), pp. 705737CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 32Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., pp. 28–29.

4 Barrera, Mario and Haas, Ernst B., “The Operationalization of Some Variables Related to Regional Integration: A Research Note,” International Organization, Winter 1969 (Vol. 23, No. 1), pp. 150160CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmitter, Philippe C., “Further Notes on Operationalizing Some Variables Related to Regional Integration,” International Organization, Spring 1969 (Vol. 23, No. 2), pp. 327336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Nye, Joseph S., “Comparative Regional Integration: Concept and Measurement,” International Organization, Autumn 1968 (Vol. 22, No. 4), pp. 855880CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Stinchcombe, p. 80.

7 This propensity of regional integration to heighten sensitivities to the relative performance of one's partners might be called “Anderson's paradox.” See Anderson, Charles W., Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Restless Nations (Princeton, N.J: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1967), p. 61Google Scholar.

8 Schmitter, Philippe C., “La dinámica de contradicciones y la conducción de crisis en la integración centroamericana,” Revista de la integración, 11 1969 (No. 5), pp. 87151Google Scholar.

9 For example, Deutsch, Karl, and others, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Etzioni, Amitai, Political Unification: A Comparative Study of Leaders and Forces (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965)Google Scholar.

10 Nota bene the caveat “to enforce regional decisions.” International violence not directly related to integration issues doesn't “disprove” the theory and may not even make it irrelevant. See my article in Revista de la integratión, No. 5 for a discussion of this in the context of the El Salvador-Honduras “Football War.”

11 Mitchell, Joyce M. and Mitchell, William C., Political Analysis and Public Policy: An Introduction to Political Science (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), pp. 135159, especially pp. 138–139Google Scholar.

12 In the initial cycles of the model national actors are treated as unities—as national governmental authorities calculating a single strategy vis-à-vis the issue at hand. Subsequently, during the transforming cycles these national actors become differentiated into subnational groups each with its own integrative strategy. Both Joseph Nye and Leon Lindberg in their comments on the first draft of this article suggested that national actors lose their unity earlier in the process than I have hypothesized here. Lindberg, citing Haas's, ErnstThe Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950–1957 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1958) as evidence, even argued that in the initial cycles one is likely to find differentiated national strategies rather than a single, prior, elaborated positionGoogle Scholar.

13 I have sought to operationalize this dimension by means of a scalogram of some 44 dichotomized institutional characteristics measuring change in the four Parsonian functional domains. On the basis of a pretest which solicited evaluations from colleagues doing research in international organizations I have tentatively concluded that, while a reproducible and reliable scalogram does emerge, its utility is limited to gross, aggregate comparison across institutions. The measurement interval is too great to permit accurate, discrete measurement of the evolution of the authority of a single international organization over time. I hope to publish this preliminary analysis shortly. See my “International Organization Development: Measuring the Dependent Variable” (unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago, 01 1969)Google Scholar.

Leon Lindberg has been experimenting with a variety of 0–6 ranking techniques which may also prove useful for comparative purposes, although he draws a distinction between “stage of decision” and “degree of decisiveness” not made here. Cf. his contribution to this volume. For a related effort in the context of the United Nations see Keohane, Robert O., “Institutionalization in the United Nations General Assembly,” International Organization, Autumn 1969 (Vol. 23, No. 4), pp. 859896CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Lindberg has proposed a checklist of some 22 issue areas covering external, economic, political constitutional, and sociocultural issues. I would be much more inclined to begin with Joseph Nye's nomothetic suggestion and simply list “outward” governmental ministries, autonomous agencies, and quasi-public institutes for each member state according to some inductive criteria of their “political distance” from the original joint policymaking areas. This technique has the added payoff of pointing out asymmetric organizational patterns and differential policy coverage of the integrating units. Cf. Nye, Joseph S. Jr, International Organization, Vol. 23, No. 4, p. 869Google Scholar.

15 My emphasis on “sunken costs” in explaining organizational behavior was inspired by Stinchcombe, Arthur, pp. 120125Google Scholar.

16 Schmitter, Philippe C., “Three Neo-Functional Hypotheses about International Integration,” International Organization, Winter 1969 (Vol. 23, No. 1), pp. 162164CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Stinchcombe, pp. 80–82.

18 See pp. 860–868 for additional discussion of possible “motives” underlying this propensity for entropic solutions. For a discussion in the light of case study see my article in Revista de la integración, No. 5, pp. 141, 147–148Google Scholar.

19 Schmitter, , International Organization, Vol. 23, No. 4, p. 166Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., p. 165.

21 One case study which in effect tried this has concluded that the original Haas-Schmitter list of variables was both irrelevant and incomplete. See Jalloh, Abdul Aziz, “Regional Political Integration in Africa: The Lessons of the Last Decade” (unpublished manuscript, Yale University, 1970)Google Scholar.

22 Cf. J. S. Nye's article in this volume for the original inspiration concerning curvilinearity.

23 Cf. the Haas-Barrera and Schmitter articles on operationalization cited in footnote 4.

24 Savage, J. Richard and Deutsch, Karl W., “A Statistical Model for the Gross Analysis of Transaction Flows,” Econometrica, 07 1960 (Vol. 28, No. 3), p. 551CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Russett, Bruce M., “‘Regional’ Trading Patterns: 1938–1963,” International Studies Quarterly, 12 1968 (Vol. 12, No. 4), pp. 360379CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent discussion of the utility of various transactional indicators, see Donald Puchala in this volume.

26 Again, see the Haas-Barrera and Schmitter articles cited in footnote 4.

27 Cf. articles by Donald Puchala and Ronald Inglehart in this volume.

28 Schmitter, , International Organization, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 334336Google Scholar.

29 See the caveat introduced in footnote 13, p. 844.

30 All of these hypotheses, although stated in a linear fashion, are subject to the caveat introduced on p. 849 above, that beyond a certain threshold their predicted effect is likely to become curvilinear or even parabolic.

31 Schmitter, , International Organization, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 162163Google Scholar. For the case study from which this paradox is derived see Scheinman, Lawrence, “Euratom: Nuclear Energy in Europe,” International Conciliation, 05 1967 (No. 563)Google Scholar.

32 For a summary see the above cited articles by Donald Puchala and Ronald Inglehart. Also Merritt, Richard and Puchala, Donald J., Western European Perspectives on International Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968)Google Scholar; Deutsch, Karl W., and others, France, Germany and the Western Alliance: A Study of Elite Attitudes in European Integration and World Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967)Google Scholar; Lerner, Daniel and Gordon, Morton, Euratlantica: Changing Perspectives of the European Elites (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

33 The research of Lawrence Scheinman is particularly relevant here. See his Some Preliminary Notes on Bureaucratic Relationships in the European Economic Community,” International Organization, Autumn 1966 (Vol. 20, No. 4), pp. 750773CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Lindberg, Leon and Scheingold, Stuart, in Europe's Would-Be Polity: Patterns in the European Community (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1970) argue that by treating each decision as a distinct unit “within system” comparisons can draw upon a much larger case base. Of course, this may not expand the ranges of variation very much since there is likely to be substantial autocorrelation in many variablesGoogle Scholar.

35 Jalloh, as mentioned in footnote 22, has argued the need for different variables and different weightings for the African context. I confess his case has not yet convinced me of the need for the former, but I can imagine a solution to the latter—namely, to subdivide the macrosettings further into three categories: 1) more developed countries; 2) intermediate developed countries; 3) less developed countries.

36 With the important caveat that the relative importance of independent and intervening variables is likely to change even if the direction of the effect and the basic structure of the model does not. Again, more speculative induction or postdiction is needed in order to specify which of the types of changes in national structures and values, for instance, decline in “potency” over time and which become increasingly better predictors of regional process.

37 Schmitter, , Revista de la integración, No. 5, pp. 131ffGoogle Scholar.

38 Amitai Etzioni has speculated about the necessity for the application of coercion in such circumstances. I have borrowed from him the concept of “showdown” but would disagree that it must necessarily involve the forceful imposition of one actor or coalition of actors over another, Amitai Etzioni, pp. 87–88.