The second kind of negation to neo-functionalism came from Haas himself. As the core concept “spillover” failed to encapsulate the EC in the 1970s, Haas took recourse to another approach to explain European integration: theories of interdependence developed by Keohane and Nye (1975, 1977). According to Keohane and Nye (1977), “dependence” is “a state of being determined or significantly affected by external forces”, and “interdependence” suggests mutual relations among those dependences; in world politics, interdependence, as a result of international transactions, “refers to situations characterized by reciprocal effects among countries or among actors in different countries” (Keohane and Nye 1977, 8). The key to understanding such interdependence is the involved “costs”, as Keohane and Nye state: “interdependent relationships will always involve costs, since interdependence restricts autonomy; but it is impossible to specify a priori whether the benefits of a relationship will exceed the costs. This will depend on the values of the actors as well as on the nature of the relationship” (1977, 9-10). Interdependent relationships, therefore, are not necessarily mutually beneficial, and this leads to other arguments: first, increasing joint benefits gained from an interdependent relationship do not guarantee a conflict-free distribution, and “large-net-benefit cooperation” does not exclude competition; second, interdependence is not “evenly balanced mutual dependence”, and there are asymmetries in dependence for different actors where powers and processes of political bargaining emanate (Keohane and Nye 1977, 10-11). As the world is extensively interdependent, world politics is characterized by international regimes of “networks of rules, norms and procedures that regularize behavior and control its effects”, where relationships of interdependence often occur and have been defined and affected (Keohane and Nye 1977, 19).
While having a lot in common with neo-functionalism,55 interdependence theory
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Tranholm-Mikkelsen (1991, 8) compares the similarities between neo-functionalism and interdependence theory: both “are usually associated with the so-called ‘pluralist’ or ‘cobweb’ image of international relations. Both downplay the significance of formal state boundaries; both stress the
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differentiates itself most from neo-functionalism in the aspect that it does not prescribe or envisage the outcome of international cooperation or integration: interdependence is a condition, not a process; it is shaped by political acts that are not predicted by theory (Tranholm-Mikkelsen 1991, 8-9). Interdependence theory, as argued by Taylor, actually implies contradictory propositions at two different levels: at the regional level, it suggests “a concentration of power, and the placing of functions within common frameworks”, while at the global level, it shows “the way in which powers might be disaggregated, and administrations and national interests fragmented by transgovernmental or transnational coalitions” (Taylor 1993, 2). The harsh reality of the 1970s pushed Haas to part with neo-functionalism to the degree that “the study of regional integration should be both included in and subordinated to the study of changing patterns of interdependence” (Haas 1976, 208). As a result, the notion of “integration” was defined as “institutionalized procedures devised by governments for
coping with the condition of interdependence: coping, it must be stressed, may take the
form of increasing, decreasing, or maintaining interdependence” (Haas 1976, 210, his emphasis). For Haas, in the 1970s, the EC once of a distinctive “supranational” style evolved into “a huge regional bureaucratic appendage to an intergovernmental conference in permanent session” (Haas 1975, 6; quoted in Jensen 2010, 80). In fact, as early as in the 1960s, Haas had already observed that “[d]isintegration and nationalist
immobilisme appear to dominate, rather than the advance of regional government”
(1967a, 62, his emphasis), and meanwhile, the automaticity of spillover got changed from a status of certainty to probability (Tranholm-Mikkelsen 1991, 9; see also Haas 1967a, 77). As a response to the drama of de Gaulle’s policies and Hoffmann’s criticism, Haas admitted the smooth functioning of integration requires certain conditions: the goals pursued by statesmen and non-governmental elites must be “‘incremental-economic’ rather than ‘dramatic-political’” (Tranholm-Mikkelsen 1991, 9). These pragmatical and technocratic policy-making steps led to what Haas calls “the end of ideology” (Haas 1967b, 334), that is, the doctrines and ideologies emanating from the political thought of the 19th and early 20th century could not adequately describe the dramatic economic and social changes as well as European regional integration since 1945 (Haas 1967a, 62), which implies that “as societies became richer,
importance of non-governmental actors in world politics; and both emphasize the prevalence of non-military issues in the dealings among non-socialist, developed states”.
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they would become more concerned with the pursuit of wealth rather than with nationalist, socialist or religious ideals” (Niemann 2006, 16).
As for the “contrived” or “deliberate” package deals, Haas admitted that as the political linkage of package deals became longer and more complex, the uncertainty surrounding the EC’s integration process also increased so much that policies designed by virtue of deliberate issue linkage could be “fated to fail” (Haas 1976, 209). Furthermore, by switching to interdependence theory, Haas also acknowledged another shortcoming of the original neo-functionalist theory: it focuses too narrowly on the regional integration process/entity while ignoring other external factors; the European integration project is only a part of the world economy, which cannot be insulated from the external changing environment (Jensen 2010, 80; Niemann 2006, 22).