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
“once certain powers have been delegated […], they are un- likely to be overturned in subsequent treaty reforms as at least one member state will feel that they benefi t from the Commission discretion. This leads to a long term ‘unintended consequences’ of delegation by the member states and bureau- cratic drift by the Commission” (Hix, 2005, p. 34-35).
Neofunctionalism had to admit that these were the member states whose decisions lay down the fundamentals of the integra- tion process. The main mistake of the original neofunctionalist formula- tions was then the assumption that integration would proceed steadily, automatically, as a linear continuous process. In reality, integration expanded by stops and starts. Noefunctionalists had to take into consideration various factors underestimated in their original formulations, reshaping them so as to develop eclectic theoretical synthesis to explain both coexistent and contradictory logics of the European integration processes (Rosamond, 2000).
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE – VISA, ASYLUM AND IMMIGRATION POLICY
The argument to defend in this essay is that neofunctionalism still serves well as a middle range theory to explain the develop- ment of individual policy sectors. The concept of spill over proves to be useful in explaining those policies which are placed it the ‘core of integration’, i.e. in the fi rst pillar of the EU. As Lee McGowan shows, the competi- tion policy offers one of the most convincing illustrations of the European integration process. Neofunctionalist interpretation of this policy provides us with illustrations of the spill over in its different variants. The competition policy was developed as a cor- ollary of the Single Market programme, covering at the beginning a limited area of cartels and then – thanks to the activities of DG THE RELEVANCE OF NEOFUNCTIONALISM IN EXPLAINING... 151
Competition – a much wider coverage of monopolies, mergers, liberalization and state aids (the illustration of a functional and cultivated spill over). That is as well a plausible example of the political spillover, with the emergence of supranational interest groups and the shift of loyalties to the European level, which made it possible to develop the merger control regulation despite the reluctance of state actors (McGowan, 2007). Neofunctionalism can serve to explain not only the core inte- gration areas of ‘low politics’, but also the ‘high politics’ which are very close to the heart of national sovereignty. A Niemann pro- vides us with a truly convincing explanation of the development of visa, asylum and immigration policy drawn on neofunctionalist theory in its revised version, i.e. in the frame of which integration is viewed as a dialectical process, a product of both dynamics and countervailing forces (Niemann, 2006). According to A. Niemann, the analysis of the Treaty revision negotiations on the communitarisation of visa, asylum and im- migration policy should cover fi ve main factors infl uencing the Treaty outcome which are: • Functional pressures: the most obvious stemmed from the objective of the free movement of persons, the completion of which required further measures (common policies on external border control, asylum and immigration policy were necessary to compensate for the abolishment of internal controls so as to prevent the situation when the efforts of one Member State would be undermined by liberal policies of another Member State, resulting in the free movement of illegal immigrants; another pressure to the communitarisation of these policies emerged from the dissatisfaction of collective goal attainment due to the unanimity requirement; it was predicted to be even more problematic with the perspective of the Eastern enlarge- ment); 152 MAGDALENA GODOWSKA
• Exogenous pressures: increasing number of asylum seekers, immigrants and refugees required actions going beyond the governance potential of individual nation state; • Socialization, deliberation and learning processes: frequent and often informal meetings of national offi cials led to the creation of a ‘club-atmosphere’ based on the relationships of trust, which, in turn, enabled the representatives to understand the motives of another Member State and to develop a collec- tive responsibility for the outcome of the negotiations; • The role of supranational institutions: the Commission acted as a cultivated spill over entrepreneur providing the IGCs with creative and balanced proposals and developing alliances with state and non-state actors above all the various Presidencies; • Countervailing forces: sovereignty-consciousness, i.e. the reluctance of the Member States to transfer powers to the su- pranational level, which was extremely important in the case of the policies discussed, linked so closely to the core of state sovereignty; another important factor was the existence of dif- ferent legal traditions (Niemann, 2006). To sum up, neofunctionalist theory can be applied for the ex- planation of the development and stagnancy in different areas of integration, not only the ‘low politics’, but also the more sensitive ones. By taking into account also the countervailing forces, the process of integration can be captured in a wider scope, not as a linear, automatic and only dynamic phenomenon but as a dia- lectic one, which goes much more in line with the unfolding reality of EU processes. THE RELEVANCE OF NEOFUNCTIONALISM IN EXPLAINING... 153
CONCLUSION
The point to make is that even if neofunctionalist theorizing has been criticized for many reasons, it still holds its theoretical and empirical value. The relevance of neofunctionalist assumptions proves to be high when we apply it as a middle-range theory to account for a particular policy sector, not only those of the core of integration, but also those of ‘high politics’, touching closely the national sovereignty. The aim of this essay was to prove this hypothesis by providing the reader with the examples of how to apply the neofunctionalist framework in the area of competition policy and visa, asylum and immigration policy. Even A. Moravcsik acknowledges the strengths of neofunc- tionalism theory (or framework) which correctly predicted that the “EU would establish itself by helping to meet concrete func- tional challenges within the context of the power that national governments delegated to or pooled in it” (Moravcsik, 2005, p. 377). The explanation of the European integration cannot neglect the importance of state actors and the countervailing forces which make the process not linear but rather dialectical. To conclude one can quote P.C. Schmitter who said that: “real-live noefunctionalists may be endangered species, but neo- functionalist thinking turned out to be very much alive, even if it was usually being re-branded as a different animal” (Schmitter, 2004, p. 46). 154 MAGDALENA GODOWSKA
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