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1 Working For Peace: The Functional Approach, Functionalism and Beyond
1 Working For Peace: The Functional Approach, Functionalism and Beyond
Functional Approach,
Functionalism and
Beyond
David Long and
Lucian M. Ashworth
1
2 David Long and Lucian M. Ashworth
criticized the League of Nations for failing to address the cultural and
economic causes of conflict, especially the minorities issue and the
maldistribution of wealth. The latter issue was blamed on the failure
of both capitalism and the market to properly provide for the vast
majority of the world's population. The functional approach emerged
as a possible solution to both of these problems. A function-specific
approach was meant to provide better services in an increasingly
globalized economy, while taking many policy decisions away from
institutions that were controlled by national interests.
Although most often associated with David Mitrany, the functional
approach was influenced by other writers in the turbulent two decades
between the wars. It was the form given it by Mitrany, however, that
provided the base and direction for the future functionalist paradigm
in the discipline of international relations. In this chapter we examine
the development of the functional approach by David Mitrany and
consider the changes wrought in this approach in the construction of
functionalism and neofunctional integration theory in international
relations. We then consider and try to set to rest an important critique
of the functional approach advanced by Inis Claude. We conclude
with a few remarks on the utility of reconstructing the functional
approach once again.
Functionalism and neofunctionalism are said to share a number of
characteristics as theories of integration but also to differ on such
issues as the end state of integration and the process of learning by
which integration is achieved. 1 The common view of Mitrany as
primarily an integration and international organization theorist
stems from a shift in the emphasis of the functional approach after
1945. Mitrany's perspective and what became functionalism was con-
ditioned by the academic context of debates he was engaged in pri-
marily after the Second World War. The search for, and explanation
of, 'really existing' functional organizations became a more important
goal than the articulation of the functional approach's normative base,
namely preventing war and reconciling democracy with planning.
Functionalism was widely touted as one of the few coherent (non-
communist) alternatives to the supremacy of realism in international
relations. As a result, it was adopted and adapted by a (predominantly
American) segment of the academic international relations com-
munity. In this form it was used to explain the emergence of the
European Economic Community, and functionalism came to be asso-
ciated with the study of European integration. The advent of behav-
iouralism in international relations brought a new wave of scholars
Working for Peace 3
seeking to refine old tenets into scientific theory and test them against
or othetwise apply them to empirical evidence. In the case of func-
tionalism, the 'theory' was applied to attempt to explain or account
for the rapidly growing number and size of international organiz-
ations. In the context of European integration it became the theoret-
ical alternative to the older tradition of federalism.
However, there is another, relatively neglected yet as important,
distinction: between the functional approach created by Mitrany and
the later portrayals of functionalism that were attributed to Mitrany.
Mitrany himself never used the term functionalism to describe his own
ideas. This fact is not without significance. One of the few times that
he referred to functionalism was in response to Ernst Haas. Haas's
version of functionalism, Mitrany argued, was significantly different in
its intent and context from his own work. 2 To a great extent, in fact, it
was Haas rather than Mitrany who defined what is now often referred
to as functionalism. Haas's intent was to present a critique of what he
regarded as Mitrany's 'functionalism', and to follow this up with his
own 'neofunctionalist' alternative. Yet, in trying to sum up Mitrany's
thought as part of his formulation of neofunctionalism, Haas created a
systematized form of functionalism that was distinct from Mitrany's
own functional approach. 3
In any event, the social scientific concern with explaining the develop-
ment of international integration was not where the functional
approach began, nor where Mitrany himself felt its key insights lay. In
its original formulations in the 1930s and 1940s, Mitrany's idea of the
functional approach was considerably broader than this, encompass-
ing an understanding of world politics and international organizations
as a manifestation of a broader trend towards organization and co-
operation in world politics. Much of the early work that built towards
the functional approach was set in the context of a debate on the
collective security system of the League of Nations. Mitrany then
deployed it, most famously, as an approach to post-Second World
War reconstruction.
InA Working Peace System, Mitrany argued that reconstruction was
the most important task facing international politics after the Second
World War. Reconstruction was necessary to maintain peace, and
subsequently to build prosperity. He dismissed suggestions that a
4 David Long and Lucian M. Ashworth
revived League of Nations would be an adequate response to the
requirements of postwar reconstruction and systematically criticized
suggestions of international federations based on common liberal
democratic ideology or regional contiguity as bases for the postwar
world order. Mitrany proposed instead what he described as 'The
Functional Alternative'. He based his argument for this alternative on
a brief consideration of what he called 'The Trend of Our Time', by
which he meant the transformation of the role of government from
the protector of a constitution that guaranteed individual rights to a
facilitator, organizer and provider of social services. Mitrany accepted
the common social liberal wisdom of his era that the classical form of
state that provided no more than formal means for the guaranteeing
of what today are called negative rights was obsolete. This old form of
state was being superseded by a welfare state where negative rights
were both guaranteed and complemented by the provision of welfare
services to meet needs (or positive rights). He argued that
Society is everywhere in travail because it is everywhere in transi-
tion. Its problem after a century of laissez faire philosophy is to re-
sift in the light of new economic possibilities and of new social
aspirations what is private from what has to be public, and in the
latter sphere what is local and national from what is wider. 4
According to Mitrany the corollary of the transformation of the
nature of governance was the collapse of the distinction between
international and domestic government that went with the constitu-
tional understanding of the role of the state. The transition from
rights to services for Mitrany also entailed the shift 'from power poli-
tics to a functional order'. 5 This is because the division between
domestic and international realms made some sense in a world of
states that were either autocratic and took their citizens' rights for
granted or liberal and protected individual rights and liberties. With
the emergence of the welfare orientation of states towards citizens'
individual and collective needs, the international/domestic distinction
made less sense - what mattered was not the protection of rights
within the framework of a liberal state but the most efficient, effective
and equitable provision of needs.
Mitrany applied these insights to certain problems in international
relations such as the thorny issue of peaceful change and the equality
of states in international relations. He then suggested that 'The Broad
Lines of Functional Organization' - that is, the future shape of co-
operation and organization in international relations - should and in
Working for Peace 5
fact will follow a variant of the Comtean principle: 'Activities would
be selected specifically and organized separately, each according to its
nature, to the conditions under which it has to operate, and to the
needs of the moment.' 6 This suggested to him that, for instance,
railway systems should be organized continentally, shipping interna-
tionally (meaning involving those states who are interested in ship-
ping) and broadcasting what he calls 'universally'. The key or 'cardinal
virtue of the functional method' was 'technical self-determination'; as
Mitrany argued, 'The function, one might say, determines the execu-
tive instrument suitable for its proper activity, and by the same process
provides a need for the reform of that instrument at every stage.' 7
Thus the geographic reach and the organizational structure, nature
and power derived simply from the issue under consideration, accord-
ing to Mitrany. While there were issues of coordination within and
between separate functions as well as the question of system-level
planning or guidance, Mitrany did not expect these to be insurmount-
able. They were, he thought, themselves technical questions.
Mitrany conceived of military security as a negative 'law and order'
function, and thus as one among many functions. This conceptualiz-
ation was intended to reduce the superordinate status of security in
international relations ordained for it by realism, in which all issues
are ranked and ordered according to their salience for national mili-
tary security. Security as defence was likely to be most effectively
organized regionally, according to Mitrany. But this was only one
aspect of security. In a passage that anticipates a lot of the more
recent discussion of a wider notion of security, Mitrany suggested that
social security, such as health issues and the drug and white slave
traffic, was of rising importance and involves, for example, police
cooperation rather than military competition. 8
Mitrany hoped that overlapping separate functional organizations
would 'combine as well as may be international organization with
national freedom,' in a way that paralleled the preservation of individ-
ual free choice in the face of national planning for the common good
in the domestic context. 9 He suggested that separate functional orga-
nizations would create devolved structures in the face of the centraliz-
ing tendencies of the welfare service provision of modem government.
InA Working Peace System, reconciling democracy with planning was a
central and crucial concern. Mitrany did not believe that traditional
democratic methods would work in the face of 'The Trend of Our
Time'. According to Mitrany, state equality in representation in inter-
national organizations was a by-product of the doctrine of national
6 David Long and Lucian M. Ashworth
sovereignty further exacerbated by the prerequisites of national plan-
ning. Mitrany argued for 'equality in non-representation', because
arguments for formal equality of all states led to either 'equality
without government, or government without equality.' Instead, repre-
sentation should be limited to those who had a specific interest in an
issue. 10
Extrapolating from the examples of nineteenth-century interna-
tional organization for communications and transport as well as from
Depression and Second World War era instances of functional organ-
ization within and between states (especially the United States),
Mitrany suggests reconstruction after the War should be organized
functionally in order to create not 'a protected peace but ... a working
peace', 11 concentrating on fulfilling needs as efficiently and effectively
as possible. National agencies would not wither away, he claimed, but
would expand with functional cooperation, while 'action through func-
tional agencies would minimize the intrusion of power politics in the
guise of foreign help, or the wasteful use of international help by
national agencies.m The narrow concern with postwar reconstruction
gives way at the end of A Working Peace System to a consideration of
'the real tasks of our common society - the conquest of poverty and of
disease and of ignorance.' 13 Given the all-pervasiveness of social inter-
dependence, the functional approach, Mitrany argued, offered the
best prospect for peace and for prosperity in the modern era.
In sum, the functional approach emphasized that cooperation
across national boundaries occurred because the maximization of
social welfare, though a goal of states, was not attainable within the
boundaries of each national state separately. In Mitrany's interna-
tional theory, in sharp distinction to realist interpretations, the foreign
behaviour of states in the era of the welfare state is influenced by the
same broad goals of social welfare that determine domestic politics.
While realist authors stress the fundamental differences between
foreign and domestic policy, Mitrany suggested that the development
of the welfare state, while making international cooperation neces-
sary, also helped to collapse the distinction between internal and
international state behaviour. 14
Mitrany believed that it was on specific technical issues that cooper-
ation would advance first and fastest. Cooperation would be embodied
and facilitated through international organizations concerning them-
selves with the specific function that was within their mandate.
Mitrany pointed out that modern government gave a strong indication
of the direction of functional development of government towards
Working for Peace 7
specialized technical agencies, the Tennessee Valley Authority being a
clear example of this. In the international realm, Mitrany initially
cited the development of international organization in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, highlighting the importance of such
functionally oriented bodies as the Universal Postal Union, the
International Telegraphic Union and the International Maritime
Organization, as well as the creation and operation of the
International Labour Organization. He claimed that the trend of
international relations was toward greater international organization
along these lines. While there might be arguments about Mitrany's
explanation of the 'trend of the times' in politics and international
relations, the identification of the proliferation of international
organizations and their increasingly technical and specialist character
has certainly proven true. Nevertheless, Mitrany might be dis-
appointed at the extent to which international organizations are still
dominated by states in terms of their representation and the concerns
they address.
CRITICISMS
Separability
Transferability
ASSESSMENT
CONCLUSION
Notes