In a comment on Haas’s famous study, the English realist F. S. Northedge
remarked that the ILO is ‘beyond the nation-state’ in the same way that
Trafalgar Square is beyond Charing Cross Station. The meaning of this
somewhat enigmatic remark is that while the ILO with its tripartite struc-
ture of state, trade unions and employers’ representatives is undoubtedly in
a different place from (cf. spatially beyond) the nation-state, it can in no
sense be said to have
transcended that institution.
An extremely elaborate
network of institutions has emerged in the world but, contrary to the expec-
tations of functionalists, the Westphalia System remains in place and sover-
eignty is undiminished as a guiding principle. It seems that the sovereign
state has been able to ringfence functional cooperation, and isolate itself
from the supposedly corrosive effects of functionalism. From a realist point
of view it is clear what has gone wrong;
the political psychology of
functionalism is misconceived. Loyalty to the state actually rests on two
pillars. First, it is an affective phenomenon rather than purely instrumental –
for many, the state represents the nation, the nation is Burke’s contract
between generations past, present and future, and this contract rests on ties
of birth, language, attachment to a territory, and a culture, none of
which are factors which can be diminished by functional
cooperation across
state boundaries. But second, in so far as loyalty is instrumental, it is
the ability of the state to provide basic physical security that is the key, the
ability to protect the people from outsiders – and the performance of this
function is, literally under Mitrany’s model, the last thing that governments
will surrender.
It could be argued that this realist position rests on as implausible a view
of political psychology as does functionalism: very few states are actually
nations; most people are more in danger from their own governments than
from foreigners; much of the time ‘loyalty’ is
coerced rather than freely
given. However, behind the realist position lies a rather better general
criticism of functionalism which rests on a less romantic view of the state.
Mitrany – along with some at least of his successors – offered an essentially
a-political account of functional cooperation. He approached problems with
the soul of a technician. The underlying assumption is that the problems that
functional cooperation is supposed to solve are essentially technical prob-
lems which admit to a technical solution. Administration can be divorced
from politics – a very nineteenth-century, positivist view of the world, and
one shared, for example, by John Burton whose notion of ‘systemic’
problem-solving, as opposed to the non-systemic
approach of states, rests on
a similar distrust and marginalization of the political (Burton 1968).
The difficulty, of course, is that even the most technical of solutions to the
most technical of problems will always have political implications, will
always have the potential to benefit one group and disadvantage another.
The basic rule of the Universal Postal Union, which is that each state has an
Global Governance
121
obligation to deliver international mail on its own territory,
seems as purely
technical a solution to the problem of an effective mail system as can be
imagined, yet it has enormous political implications when it comes to issues
such as the dissemination of political, religious or pornographic material
through the mail. The gathering of information for effective weather fore-
casting seems innocuous but will be resisted by closed societies. At the other
extreme, no one needs to be reminded of the political implications of such
matters as labour standards or the regulation of trade or international
capital markets. All of these examples of functional cooperation involve the
distribution
of gains and losses, a determination of who gets what, where
and when. There are no technical problems, there are no technical solu-
tions, and because of this, states are often very unwilling to allow problems
to be dealt with ‘functionally’. Thus it is that the state-centric nature of the
functional agencies of the United Nations is not an accident. No major state
has been willing to allow issues which it regards as political to be dealt with
in an allegedly non-political way, and even if any
state were so willing it is
moot whether their populations would be equally tolerant when the conse-
quences became clear.
For this reason, the full-blown functionalist model of international
cooperation has to be regarded as a failure. Still, no theory of similar range
or scope has yet been produced, and some at least of the language of func-
tionalism persists in other, less ambitious, but perhaps more successful
theories. Moreover, the functionalist opposition to
the principle of territori-
ality strikes a chord in the context of an era of globalization in which new
notions of political space are emerging.
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