Theories of European Integration
For many years, the academic study of the European Communities (EC), as they were then called, was virtually synonymous with the study of European integration. The initially modest and largely technocratic achievements of the EC seemed less significant than the potential that they represented for the gradual integration of the countries of western Europe into something else: a supranational polity. When the integration process was going well, as during the 1950s and early 1960s, neo-functionalists and other theorists sought to explain the process whereby European integration proceeded from modest sectoral beginnings to something broader and more ambitious. When things seemed to be going badly, as from the 1960s until the early 1980s, intergovernmentalists and others sought to explain why the integration process had not proceeded as smoothly as its founders had hoped. Regardless of the differences among these bodies of theory, we can say clearly that the early literature on the EC sought to explain the process of European integration (rather than, say, policy-making), and that in doing so it drew largely (but not exclusively) on theories of international relations.
In the first edition of this volume, Carole Webb (1977) surveyed the debate among the then dominant schools of European integration, neo-functionalism, and intergovernmentalism, drawing from each approach a set of implications and hypotheses about the nature of the EC policy process. Similarly, here we review neo-functionalism and its views about the EU policy process, and then the intergovernmentalist response, as well as the updating of ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ by Andrew Moravcsik in the 1990s.
In addition, we examine more recent bodies of integration theory-institutionalism and constructivism-which offer very different views of the integration process and very different implications for EU policy-making.