The Study of Regional Integration: Reflections on the Joy and Anguish of Pretheorizing

Abstract

Why have we been studying something we call “regional integration” for about fifteen years ? We were stimulated by two otherwise unrelated trends: the flowering in the United States of systematic social science and the blooming in Europe of political efforts to build a united continent, to “integrate” Western Europe at least. But the story of integration encompassed a mixed bag of heroes ranging from such regional “integrators”as Napoleon Bonaparte and Simón Bolívar to nation-building statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Camillo Cavour. Some saw even in Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo certain characteristics of the political actor who seeks to integrate nations into a regional unit. Are we then studying any kind of political unification ?

Image and venue as factors mediating latent spillover pressure for agenda-setting change

“…Figure 2 offers a combined framework for conceiving of mediating factors in agenda-setting that marries Princen's (2011) typologies of agenda-setting strategies (in the double-lined box) -after Baumgartner and Jones's (1993) notions of venue and image -with Haas' (1958Haas' ( , 1970Haas' ( , 1975 notion of neofunctionalist spillover. The framework might be conceived of metaphorically as a sandwichone made from two slices of spillover bread with a 'nutritious' filling of venues and images, i.e., as a dynamic by which venues and images mediate the build-up and potential release of latent pressures for policy integration, determining whether or not spillovers occur.…”

The Fiscal Anatomy of a Regulatory Polity: Tax Policy and Multilevel Governance in the EU

“…15 Risse-Kappen 1996. Major contributions to this debate include Beck and Grande 2007;Caporaso 1996;Haas 1971;Marks, Hooghe and Blank 1996;Majone 1994;Puchala 1972;Ruggie 1993;and Schmitter 1996. 16 This includes authors as diverse as Moravcsik 2005, 364 fn.…”

Policy Travel in Regionalisation of Higher Education: The Case of Bologna Process in Africa

“…The concept originally developed in the United States of America as an instrument to explain the adoption of policies and how they spread or diffuse throughout the federal system (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996). Gradually, however, the notion of policy travel started to be taken as one of the instruments of comparative regional policy studies especially within studies of European integration (Haas 1970). This is because the concept of policy travel is embodied within the notion of globalisation since both are usually conceptualised in relation to their capacity to harmonise systems and embrace interconnectedness of variance across many jurisdictions.…”