Neofunctionalism

 

       

Neofunctionalism is a theory of regional integration, building on the work of Ernst B. Haas, an American political scientist and also Leon Lindberg, an American political scientist.

        The main contributions of these authors was an employment of empiricism.

        Neofunctionalism describes and explains the process of regional integration with reference to how three causal factors interact with one another:

(a) growing economic interdependence between nations,

(b) organizational capacity to resolve disputes and build international legal regimes, and

(c) supranational market rules that replace national regulatory regimes.^[2]

Early Neofunctionalist theory assumed a decline in importance of nationalism and the nation-state;

It predicted that, gradually, elected officials, interest groups, and large commercial interests within states would see it in their interests to pursue welfarist objectives best satisfied by the political and market integration at a higher, supranational level.

Haas theorized three mechanisms that he thought would drive the integration forward:

Positive spillover,

The transfer of domestic allegiances and

Technocratic automaticity.

Positive spillover effect is the notion that integration between states in one economic sector will create strong incentives for integration in further sectors, in order to fully capture the perks of integration in the sector in which it started.

Increased number of transactions and intensity of negotiations then takes place hand in hand with increasing regional integration. This leads to a creation of institutions that work without reference to "local" governments.

The mechanism of a transfer in domestic allegiances can be best understood by first noting that an important assumption within neofunctionalist thinking is of a pluralistic society within the relevant nation states.

Neofunctionalists claim that, as the process of integration gathers pace, interest groups and associations within the pluralistic societies of the individual nation states will transfer their allegiance away from national institutions towards the supranational European institutions.

Greater regulatory complexity is then needed and other institutions on regional level are usually called for. This causes integration to be transferred to higher levels of decision-making processes.

Technocratic automaticity described the way in which, as integration proceeds, the supranational institutions set up to oversee that integration process will themselves take the lead in sponsoring further integration as they become more powerful and more autonomous of the member states. In the Haas-Schmitter model, size of unit, rate of transactions, pluralism, and elite complementarity are the background conditions on which the process of integration depends.

political integration will then become an "inevitable" side effect of integration in economic sectors.

Intergovernmentalism is an alternative theory of political integration, where power in international organizations is possessed by the member-states and decisions are made by unanimity.

Neofunctionalists have attacked Intergovernmentalism on theoretical grounds, and on the basis of empirical evidence which they claim show that Intergovernmentalism is incapable of explaining the dynamics and overall trajectory of European integration. ^[7]