functionalism. Functionalism is the most elaborate, intellectually sophisti-
cated and ambitious attempt yet made not just to understand the growth of
international institutions, but also to plot the trajectory of this growth into
the future, and to come to terms with its normative implications. It is an
original
set of ideas, parallel in scope to realism, but, unlike realism, it has
little contact with past diplomatic tradition. While one figure, David
Mitrany, could reasonably claim to be the originator of functionalism, his
account of the world has been taken up and employed in case studies and
theoretical work by scholars such as Joseph Nye, Ernst Haas, J. P. Sewell,
Paul Taylor, A. J. R. Groom and, in a rather idiosyncratic way, by John
Burton
and theorists of world society such as Christopher Mitchell and
Michael Banks. Functionalism is certainly the most important approach to
international institutions to have emerged in the twentieth century – which
is not to say that all of its ideas, or even most of them, stand up to critical
scrutiny.
The key to an understanding of functionalism is that although it offers an
explanation for the past growth and future prospects of international
institutions this is not its primary intention. Rather, it is an account of the
conditions of peace. It emerged in the 1940s as a reaction to state-centric
approaches to peace such as federalism and collective security. Mitrany’s
insight was that these approaches failed not because the demands they made
on states were too radical – the common criticism – but because they were
not radical enough. Collective security leaves
untouched the sovereign
power of states to determine whether or not to respond to its imperatives;
legally states may be bound to act in certain kinds of ways but they retain
the power to disregard legality when it suits them. Federalism on a world
scale might create the conditions in which states are no longer capable
of acting in this way, but, for precisely this reason, states are unwilling
to federate. Both approaches fail because they attempt to work with the
grain of sovereignty while producing results which go against the grain of
sovereignty – a
frontal assault on juridical sovereignty which leaves politi-
cal sovereignty intact is bound to fail. Instead, Mitrany argued that a ‘work-
ing peace system’ could only be
constructed from the bottom up, by
encouraging forms of cooperation which bypassed the issue of formal sov-
ereignty but instead gradually reduced the capacity of states to actually act
as sovereigns (Mitrany 1966). Two formulae here summarize the argument:
‘form follows function’ and ‘peace in parts’ (Nye 1971).
‘Form follows function’ collapses a number of propositions. First, coop-
eration will only work if it is focused on particular and specific activities
(‘functions’) which are currently performed by states but which would be
performed more effectively in some wider context. Second, the form which
such cooperation takes should be determined by the nature of the function
in question – thus, for some functions a global institution will be appropriate
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while for others regional, or even local, institutions are all that is necessary.
Sometimes the exchange of information is all that is required,
in other cases
power of decision may need to be vested with functional institutions.
Workers’ organizations and employers’ groups should be concerned with
labour standards, medical doctors and health administrators with the erad-
ication of disease. Each functional organization should be set up in such a
way that it is appropriately designed to cope with its particular function.
‘Peace in parts’ describes the hoped-for collective outcome of these
individual cases of functional cooperation. The functionalist model of
sovereignty stresses the primacy of the political dimension of sovereignty
described above. Sovereignty is a bundle of powers. As these powers are
gradually shifted away from the state to functional organizations, so,
gradually, the capacity of the state to act as a sovereign will diminish. There
is an element of political psychology involved here; the assumption is that
the loyalty individuals give to states is a product
of the things states do for
them and, as other institutions take over the performance of particular
activities, so loyalty will drain away. Moreover, the result of functional
cooperation is not to create a new, larger, more effective state – instead the
territorial basis of the system will, itself, be undermined by the precept that
form follows function. Gradually the territorial state will come to exercise
fewer and fewer functions – instead states will be anomalous institutions
attempting to be multi-functional and territorial in a world in which most
of the business of governing and administration will be carried out by
bodies that are functionally specific and non-territorial.
Mitrany’s basic ideas have inspired a number
of later theoretical works,
and some very famous case studies, in particular
Beyond the Nation State,
Ernst B. Haas’s account of the International Labour Organization (ILO),
and
Functionalism and World Politics, J. P. Sewell’s account of UNESCO
(Haas 1964; Sewell 1966). Clearly the ‘functional agencies’ of the United
Nations system provide a range of possible case studies – although, for the
most part, they breach the injunction that ‘form follows function’, being
global bodies, and mostly dominated by states rather than the performers of
functions. Functionalism has also influenced thinking on regional organiza-
tions, although, as
the next section will suggest, only in a ‘neo’ form.
The connection between functionalist ideas and Burton’s notion of the
‘
cobweb’ model of world society (Burton 1972) is clear, and acknowledged
by writers such as Mitchell and Groom, if not by Burton himself. Accounts
of the world economy which stress
globalization owe much to functionalist
thinking, likewise recent work on the
de-bordering of states. In short,
we have here a model of global governance which has quite widespread
influence even if the full version of Mitrany’s vision is subscribed to by very
few. What are the problems with functionalism – why has it not been even
more influential?
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