ABSTRACT
Functionalism is a strategy for effecting cooperation and policy coordination between nation states. It is also a theory which claims to explain the logistics at work in the process of international change. The intensification of global exchanges in the technical, communications and commercial spheres had encouraged an organisational response to better coordinate and control these transactions, long before European integration became a realistic prospect. Organisations such as the International Telegraph Union (1865) and the Agreement on Universal Postal Measures (1875) had already helped to regulate interstate relations on a voluntaristic and intergovernmental basis. These developments were, in essence, a managed response to the onset of a global political economy.1 Claude has described their dynamics as a means of coping with the
unprecedented international flow of commerce in goods, services, peoples, ideas, germs and social evils; only a short while before the nation state had been too large to serve as the appropriate administrative unit for many of the affairs of man in society; now it had become too small…2
The functionalist approach to the organisation of international affairs was concerned with identifying those factors which would bring a measure of order and stability to an otherwise anarchic world of untrammelled realpolitik, militarism and intensified economic competitiveness. There was an implicit assumption among the functionalist theorists who addressed these issues that cooperation in merely technical and commercial matters would have positive consequences for political integration. This was more than just a pious aspiration harboured by academic commentators remote from worldly affairs. The effective work of both the League of Nations and the UN in these technical and welfare areas after both world wars was inspired by similar aspirations. Functionalism, in both theory and practice, certainly challenged the conventional realist assumptions that saw the world as a Hobbesian void consisting of competing and narrowly self interested states. They replaced in their model of the international system this image of endemic anarchy with one of a potentially cooperative welfare community united by intrinsic interests, sharing similar aspirations and striving for common goals.3
