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The Relevance of Neofunctionalism in Explaining European Integration in Its Origins and Today

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The Relevance of Neofunctionalism in Explaining European Integration in Its Origins and Today DOI: 10.2478/v10241-012-0030-6 Magdalena Godowska*1 The relevance of neofunctionalism in explaining European integration in its origins and today ABSTRACT The aim of this essay is to try to answer the question about the relevance of neofunctionalism in explaining the European reality by taking into consid- eration some of the strengths and weaknesses of the neofunctionalism theory. The hypothesis is that in spite of the wave of criticism, neofunctionalism is still worth considering, especially in order to explain specifi c aspects of the integra- tion processes. The analysis is based on the examination of main features of the revised neofunctionalism theory, taking into account main critics of the original formulations – both ‘internal critiques’ developed by E.B. Hass, and ‘external critiques’ formulated by its opponents. The aim of this essay is to prove the relevance of this theory in explaining European integration by providing the reader with the examples of how to apply neofunctionalist framework in the area of competition policy and visa, asylum and immigration policy. KEYWORDS: neofunctionalism, European integration, competition policy, visa, asylum and immigration policy, spillover, supranational * Correspondence regarding the paper should be sent to: Magdalena Godo- wska, Institute of European Studies Jagiellonian University, Ul. Jodłowa 13, 30-252 Krakow, e-mail: [email protected] 146 MAGDALENA GODOWSKA INTRODUCTION “No theory of regional integration has been as misunderstood, caricatured, pilloried, proven wrong, and rejected as often as neo- functionalism” – claims Philippe C. Schmitter (Schmitter, 2004, p. 46). He then poses himself a question about the reasonableness of reviewing neofunctionalism and its relevance in explaining the European reality instead of celebrating its demise (Schmitter, 2004). The aim of this essay is to try to answer this question by taking into consideration some of the strengths and weaknesses of the neofunctionalism theory in accounting for the European integration processes. Neofunctionalism explained the new types of cooperation de- veloped after the Second World War in a highly convincing way, but it turned out to be no longer credible to account for the unfold- ing European reality in the following decades, i.e. the slowdown of the integration since the late 1960s as well as the strengthen- ing of national interests and intergovernmental elements of the EEC. Consequently, it has been criticized mainly because of the lack of empirical evidence for its predictions. The time for revival in interest in neofunctionalism began with the new stage of the European integration since the creation of the Single European Market which triggered new dynamics of the integration. The theoretical value of neofunctionalist assertions is then a frequently discussed topic among the scholars. The question which should be asked is as follows: how can a revised neofunc- tionalism theory serve to explain European integration today? In this essay the hypothesis is that in spite of the wave of criticism, neofunctionalism is still worth considering, especially in order to explain specifi c aspects of the integration processes. The analysis is based on the examination of main features of the revised neofunctionalism theory in the fi rst part. Main critics of the original formulations are taken into account – both ‘internal critiques’ developed by E.B. Hass, and ‘external critiques’ for- THE RELEVANCE OF NEOFUNCTIONALISM IN EXPLAINING... 147 mulated by its opponents, identifying weaknesses of this theory as a whole (Snidal, 2002). The second part of the essay includes an attempt to prove the relevance of this theory in explaining European integration by exploring the examples of EU policies, mainly the visa, asylum and immigration policy. ORIGINAL FORMULATIONS AND A REVISED THEORY As Ben Rosamond claims, “neofunctionalism was the child of a particular social scientifi c moment” (Rosamond, 2000), and therefore it has to be regarded through a broader intellectual background of the behavioral revolution in political science in the 1950s and 1960s. This behavioural infl uence resulted in the shift of interest into the study of the process of integration, its dynamics and drivers, rather than its end goals. The starting point to analyze the neofunctionalist output would be the original theory elaborated by Ernst B. Haas in his early works, especially in The Uniting of Europe published in 1958. A complete explanation of the original formulations of neofunc- tionalism theory is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffi ce to say that neofunctionalist assumptions proved justifi ed in the fi rst stage of the European integration – the creation of the European Economic Community and Euroatom was indeed a form of func- tional spill-over from the European Coal and Steal Community. It is worth mentioning that neofunctionalism went very much in line with the developments in social and economic thinking of those decades. Bela Balassa in his staged model of integration also assumed that a deepening of the economic integration would lead to strengthening of supranational regulatory institutions – i.e. politics would follow economics (Rosamond, 2000). Nonetheless, by the 1970s, it became obvious that neofunction- alism lacked the empiric evidence. No political integration took place in the Western Europe. According to Haas, “the end result 148 MAGDALENA GODOWSKA of a process of political integration is a new political community, superimposed over the pre-existing ones” (Haas, 2004, p. 16). As he wrote almost twenty years later: Regional integration in Western Europe has disappointed ev- erybody: there is no federation, the nation-state behaves as if it was both obstinate and obsolete, and what once appeared to be a distinctive “supranational” style now looks more like a huge regional bureaucratic appendage to an intergovern- mental conference in permanent session (Haas, 2004, p. 6). Noefunctionalists tried to rescue the idea of spillover by in- troducing concepts like ‘spillback’, ‘spill-around’, ‘stagnation’ etc. It was evident that the theory required fundamental revision (Moravcsik, 2005). The new dynamic of the European integration in the late 1980s brought with it a revival of neofunctionalism, but in a more mod- est and reshaped variant. As A. Moravcsik states ironically, since the “neofunctionalism was a leading theoretical approach for ex- plaining the EU from 1958 through the late 1980s, a rule of thumb emerged in research on the EC: whenever integration stagnated, scholars criticized neofunctionalism; whenever integration pro- gressed, they rediscovered it” (Moravcsik, 2005, p. 357). However, it is obvious that due to a great spillover potential induced by the SEM programme, the neofunctionalist thinking regained a degree of legitimacy. One of the features of the revised neofunctionalism theory was a smaller scale to which it has been applied in studying the European integration process. Neofunctionalism was the fi rst ambitious attempt to explain the European integration processes after the Second World War by creating a so-called grand theory, i.e. by discussing the process in a holistic way and providing the world of scholarship with a model of integration useful for the comparative studies of cooperation cases in other regions. Despite this laudable ambition, Andrew Moravcsik criticized THE RELEVANCE OF NEOFUNCTIONALISM IN EXPLAINING... 149 neofunctionalism as “over-ambitious, one-sided and essentially unfalsifi able [framework which] sought to explain long-term dynamic change without micro-foundational theories of static preferences, bargaining and institutional delegation – an effort that proved empirically and theoretically futile” (Moravcsik, 2005, p. 350). Moravcsik went so far in his critics as to say that “neo- functionalism is not a theory in a modern sense, but a framework comprising a series of unrelated claims” (Moravcsik, 2005, p. 350). Even noefunctionalists themselves agreed to had had too high aspirations and those scholars who tried to reactivate neofunction- alism since the 1980s, reused it as a partial, middle-range theory to account for some of the aspects of the European integration (Sandholz and Stone Sweet, 1998). Haas himself admitted a failure of predictions about the po- litically united Europe. In his opinion, neofunctionalism failed because it underestimated such factors as: a diversity of condi- tions and expectations among the member states (the emergence of new style of leadership at the national level, e.g. de Gaulle); the importance of nationalism (neofunctionalism underestimated the importance of ideology, claiming that the government is purely technocratic); the impact of the external environment (neofunc- tionalism claimed that integration was driven by solely internal factors) (Haas, 1975). According to Juliet Lodge, neofunctionalism relied too heavily on the assumption about highly rationalist motives driving the in- terest. They claimed that if an apolitical supranational institution turned out to be effective in terms of the welfare delivery, it would automatically gain the legitimacy and the capacity to command the loyalties of interest groups. As shown on the phenomenon of de Gaulle, loyalty transfer depends also on the ideological and symbolic dimension of political communities (Lodge, 1978). Neofunctionalism proved also only partially justifi able when it claimed the integration process to be irreversible. Indeed, as claims S. Hix quoting P. Pierson: 150 MAGDALENA GODOWSKA
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