A rationalist-institutionalist explanation of endogenous regional integration

Abstract:

What is at the basis of regional integration and what are the processes that drive integration? Why do integration processes develop faster in some issue areas than in others? These questions are at the heart of our own work, just as they are the driving concerns of Ernst Haas's version of neofunctionalism. While we, unlike Haas, emphasize endogenous processes of institutional change based on bargaining processes in a particular institutional context, rather than exogenously driven processes of technical needs and spillover, we believe that there is important overlap between our approach and Haas's, as well as areas of disagreement. By exploring these areas of overlap in this article, we hope - by focusing on bargaining processes - to empirically illustrate on the one hand how our approach may help to answer questions that Haas's version of neofunctionalism had difficulties with, and on the other how Haas's emphasis on epistemic factors can alleviate some of the blind spots in our own perspective.