ABSTRACT
Normative and ideational concerns have always informed the study of international politics and are a consistent thread running through the life of International Organization. When 10 was founded, dominant realist views of politics, while rejecting idealism, were very much concerned with issues of legitimacy and ideology. The early Cold War, after all, was not simply a positional conflict among anonymous great powers: it was a war for "hearts and minds." The coupling of power with "legitimate social purpose" was central to American foreign policy of this period.' At the same time, international relations scholars were busy studying two of the greatest social construction projects of the age: European integration and decolonization. Neofunctionalists, like the realists, were consciously trying to distance themselves from "idealist" predecessors (in this case, David Mitrany and his colleagues), but the complex web of technical tasks that they designed aimed at more than promoting material well-being; they aimed ultimately at ideational and social ends. Spillover was supposed to do more than create additional technical tasks; it was supposed to change attitudes, identity, and affect among participants. Likewise, scholars recognized that decolonization was driven by a profoundly normative agenda and that it explicitly sought to reconstitute the identities of both the new states and their former colonizers, as well as the relationships between them.
