Regional Arrangements and their Role in International Relations – Peu Ghosh

INTRODUCTION

• Since the end of the Second World War, the international system has shown a strong urge among states to ensure well-being, peace and security not only of the states themselves but also of individual citizens.

• States gradually realized that this objective can succeed only when national efforts are supported by the cooperation of other states of the same region.

• This realization became the foundation of regionalism from the late 1940s.

• The roots of regionalism lie in the perception of national policy-makers that states in a particular region share common interests, and these interests can be most efficiently and effectively promoted by close and continuous cooperation within a regional framework.

• Depending on the variety of interests, many regional organizations emerged, such as NATO, ASEAN, European Union, OPEC, and the Arab League, along with several others.

• Regionalism has now become a powerful force in international relations.

REGIONALISM AND INTEGRATION IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

• Regionalism relates to a particular region, and scholars have made continuous efforts to define what a region means.

• Prof. Palmer and Perkins emphasized that in international relations a region is an area covering the territories of three or more states, bound together by common interests and geography, and these states are not necessarily contiguous or even located on the same continent.

• There are no rigid or fixed rules to determine the meaning of a region, and regions are often formed by countries sharing common bonds of race, institutions, and political interests.

• When such states come together and form an organizational association at the regional level to achieve specific objectives, regional arrangements come into existence.

• It is important that states joining such organizations need not belong to the same geographical area, and the main factor that strengthens such association is common interests.

• At the San Francisco Conference (1945), the Egyptian delegation proposed an amendment to the draft United Nations Charter, defining regional arrangements as permanent organizations grouping several countries in a given geographical area, which due to proximity and community of interest or cultural, linguistic, historical, or spiritual affinities, jointly take responsibility for the peaceful settlement of disputes, maintenance of peace and security, safeguarding national interests, and the development of economic and cultural relations.

• According to Dr. E. N. Van Kleffens, a regional arrangement or pact is a voluntary association of sovereign states within a certain area or having common interests there, formed for a joint purpose, which should not be of an offensive nature.

• Before discussing present-day regional arrangements, it is necessary to examine the theory of regionalism and regional integration.

Functionalism

• Functionalism emerged as an alternative to the traditional focus of international relations on security and conflict, and visualized a gradual evolution of a peaceful, unified and cooperative world.

• The earliest and most influential exponent was David Mitrany, whose work A Working Peace System clearly explained his ideas, while other supporters included Leonard Woolf, Norman Angell, Robert Cecil, and G. D. H. Cole.

• Functionalists do not aim at creating a world federal structure; instead, they seek to build “peace by pieces” through transnational organizations based on the sharing of sovereignty rather than its total surrender, following a bottom-up approach.

• They assume that wars result from a crudely organized international system based on suspicion, anarchy, sovereignty, and national exclusivism, where war is treated as an accepted method of dispute settlement, and they believe governments will not easily abandon national interests.

• Therefore, they prescribe a realistic means to achieve idealistic ends, proposing a gradual movement toward regional or global unity that will eventually make the rigid institutional structures of the nation-states obsolete.

• Functionalism emphasizes socio-economic and welfare needs over purely political needs and advocates non-political, piecemeal cooperation in sectors such as economic, technical, scientific, social, and cultural fields, called functional sectors.

• The core idea is that it is easier to create limited functional organizations (for example in energy, transportation, communications, health, labour, and customs unions) than to establish broad political institutions that threaten national sovereignty.

• Such institutions may be international, sub-national, or transnational, and, according to Mitrany, they reduce state antagonism by creating cross-cutting ties and fostering a transnational community.

• These organizations, being largely non-political and mutually beneficial, generate a spillover effect, where successful cooperation in one sector (like coal and steel) encourages cooperation in related areas (such as transport, pollution control, and eventually political unification).

• The spillover process is strengthened by learning, and with the growth of many functional links across borders, national attitudes and institutions transform, making transnational and supranational structures dominant.

• People gradually transfer their loyalty from nation-states to transnational units, creating a new functional society focused on function rather than territory, leading, in Mitrany’s words, to “one solid international block of flats” instead of “detached national houses.”

• Functionalism has been criticized: Taylor argued it is not a systematic descriptive analysis, and functionalists are seen as piecemeal social engineers rather than designers of complete blueprints.

• Claudel criticized the long time required for integration, noting that functionalism assumes a lengthy period is both necessary and available.

• Many scholars reject the strict separation of high politics and low politics, as political factors strongly influence technical cooperation, illustrated by the U.S. withdrawal and re-entry into the ILO.

• As Kegley and Wittkopf observed, functionalism wrongly assumes that technical and political affairs can be separated, whereas politics often dominates technical cooperation.

• Despite criticisms, functionalism significantly inspired the European integration process and the functioning of international organizations like the United Nations and its specialized agencies.

Neo-Functionalism

• Drawing from functionalism and the experience of Western Europe, international relations scholars use the term integration to mean either a process toward or an end product of political unification among separate national units.

• Neo-functionalism emerged as a critique of functionalism, especially through the influential works of Ernst B. Haas (Beyond the Nation-State and The Uniting of Europe) and Karl Deutsch and his associates (Political Community and the North Atlantic Area and France, Germany and the Western Alliance), which gave major impetus to the study of regional integration.

• This scholarship led to the growth of a large body of literature explaining the process of integration in Europe and other regions, particularly the North Atlantic area.

• According to Karl Deutsch, integration is a relationship of mutual interdependence in which units jointly create system properties that they cannot produce individually.

• He argued that integration grows through increased transaction flows and expanded channels of communication, as mutually rewarding transactions promote understanding and peace.

• Deutsch defined political integration as the integration of political actors or units in relation to their political behaviour, and emphasized conditions such as higher transaction flows, mutual responsiveness, shared values, and greater geographic and social mobility.

• The transactionalist approach does not demand the total surrender of sovereignty or the creation of a world federation, but supports regional, continental, and inter-continental organizations based on continued interdependence.

• Transactionalists do not assume that the final stage of integration must be a unitary supranational state.

• Deutsch distinguished between an “amalgamated security community”, where a common government merges independent units into one, and a “pluralistic security community”, where peaceful change is institutionalized while states retain legal independence.

• A major problem with transactionalism is its failure to clarify whether integration causes increased transactions or results from them, and its assumption that greater integration automatically leads to interdependence.

• Mitrany argued that international peace can be achieved through cooperation in basic functional needs such as health, transportation, education, culture, and trade, favoring universal rather than regional organizations.

• In contrast, Haas focused on regional integration as a process in which political actors shift their loyalties and activities to a new supranational center, and examined whether integration is driven mainly by economic rather than political issues.

• For Haas, integration means the voluntary creation of larger political units in which members avoid the use of force, and the main actors are integrationist-technocrats and interest groups who persuade governments to form regional economic organizations for convergent aims.

• Integration, according to Haas, advances through a cumulative and expansive process, where organizational functions gradually increase and authority extends over a wider range of decision-making activities, assuming an automatic progression from common market to economic union and finally to political union.

• As per Kegley and Wittkopf, neo-functionalism seeks to achieve a supranational community by promoting cooperation even in politically controversial areas, and by proving the mutual benefits of integration.

• Schmitter and Haas developed a neo-functionalist paradigm with nine variables (four background conditions, two conditions at the time of economic union, and three process conditions), predicting that high-scoring organizations would evolve into a political union even if members were initially reluctant.

• Despite its appeal, the neo-functionalist approach faced many questions regarding its comparative usefulness, though it remains valuable due to its strong empirical fieldwork base.

• The original assumptions were later revised by Haas, Nye, and Lindberg to explain change in Europe and to remove Euro-centric bias, with Nye suggesting changes such as modifying automatic politicization, adding more political actors, reformulating integration conditions for less developed regions, and abandoning the idea of a single spillover path.

• In 1975, Haas argued in The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory that integration studies were becoming part of interdependence and system change, and that theorizing integration as a distinct field was no longer profitable.

• The distinction between integration and interdependence has gradually weakened.

• In the context of globalization and the post–Cold War era, new patterns of competition and cooperation, increased trade and production interdependence, and rapid changes in international finance have revived interest in regionalism, mainly in the economic sphere.

• Regionalism is now seen as a contingency plan, an intermediary between the global and the national, and a market strategy to reduce the impact of global competition.

• This has resulted in new forms of regional associations and more complex inter-state and macro-regional relationships.

• Regions now occupy a preferred place in state policy, positioned at the intersection of the local and the global, and are widely viewed as the outcome of strategic calculations by state and societal actors responding to global change.