institutions – in particular the Council of Europe – represented this aspiration
in
embryonic form, but it became clear in the course of the 1940s that a
direct assault on the sovereignty of European states would not succeed; a
fact that was finally confirmed by the failure of plans for a European
Defence Union (EDU), scuppered by the French National Assembly in
1954. Instead, the founding fathers of European integration – Monnet, De
Gasperi and Schuman – drew on some functionalist ideas, and on the expe-
rience of American aid under the Marshall Plan, to chart a different route to
European unity. Functionalists look to undermine state sovereignty from
below, by stripping away the powers of the state piecemeal, salami-style: in
the Committee for European Economic Cooperation – later to become the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) –
which was set up to distribute Marshall Aid,
the European recipients were
obliged to produce common plans for this distribution. The result of
combining this strategy with that experience was a route to European
polit-
ical unity which went via European
economic unity – hence the formation
of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952, and of
Euratom and the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1956. These
three institutions were later solidified as the European Community (EC),
now rebranded as the European Union (EU).
These were, and are, unique organizations. Although in formal terms
much of the decision-making power in the EU rests with state representa-
tives in the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, a body of
appointed bureaucrats (nowadays one Commissioner from each member-
state), has the capacity to initiate policy, the
European Court is empowered
to decide many intra-Community disputes, and, more recently, a directly
elected European Parliament has some significant powers it can employ
independent of state control. These institutions taken together mean that
the (current) twenty-five member-states and 400 million citizens of the
Union are taking part in a unique process of international institutional
cooperation.
How is this process to be understood? It clearly differs from the func-
tionalist notions of Mitrany and his collaborators in two key respects. In the
first place, the intention was – and is – to create a new
state via international
institution-building; the end result has always been intended to be the
(con)federal Europe that could not be created by direct action. Although
politicians
in some parts of the community, especially Britain and
Scandinavia, may find it convenient to deny this aspiration it remains central –
although what federalism actually means in this context is contentious. In
any event, the European institutions were not and are not designed on a
‘form follows function’ basis, hence the opposition of many integrationists
to the quasi-functionalist principle of a ‘two- (or “
n”-) speed Europe’ in
which different parts of the Union integrate at different rates.
Global Governance
123
Perhaps even more important is the second difference with functionalism.
As with functionalism, the aim was that institutional cooperation would
expand, as states discovered that cooperation in one area naturally led to
cooperation in another; the difference is that in the European system this
expansion (or ‘spillover’) is, and was intended to be, an overtly
political
process. The abolition of internal tariffs between member countries creates
a political demand to equalize as far as possible
production and transport
costs. The idea is that political parties and pressure groups will gradually
come to put pressure on central institutions rather than ‘local’ governments.
Whereas politics is the enemy of functionalism, it was meant to be the
driving force of European integration.
These two departures from the functionalist model lead some writers to
distil from the European experience an approach to integration they called
neofunctionalism, which could provide a theoretical basis for other exam-
ples of integration in, for example, Africa, or Latin America. It is important
to put the matter this way round because sometimes the impression is given
that Europe has been some kind of test for the neofunctionalist model. Not
so – the idea that integration between states could come as a result of a
politically driven process of spillover,
the heart of neofunctionalism, was
drawn from European experience rather than
applied to it. In any event,
regarded as a model, how does neofunctionalism fare? Not very well has to
be the basic answer. The European experience has not proved to be
exportable; other examples of integration have generally not followed the
European (neofunctional) model. Moreover, even within Europe, the model
clearly has not worked in any consistent way. Sometimes spillover has taken
place, sometimes it has not. Some pressure groups have operated at the
European level, others have not – it is striking, for example, that despite
the obvious importance of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the
extent to which CAP
rulings are made in Brussels, farmers’ organizations
throughout the Union remain largely oriented towards putting pressure on
their home governments rather than the central institutions. ‘Functional
autonomy’ is the watchword here. European integration has proceeded by
stops and starts rather than as a smooth process of spillover – and the
factors that have, at different times, restarted the process have not followed
any obvious pattern. Integration has taken place in ways and at speeds
determined by the course of events and not in accordance with any theoret-
ical model. Later writers have stressed ‘intergovernmentalism’ – on this
account, the process of integration is driven by interstate bargaining;
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