James A. Caporaso

Integrating Institutions Rationalism, Constructivism, and the Study of the European Union

Three central goals motivate this introductory essay and the articles that follow. First, we seek better understanding of the EUs own institutions, especially to the extent that they play a role in or represent the process of integration. Second, we seek better integration of the multiple general understandings of institutions and primarily of rationalist and constructivist conceptions. Third and most important, we seek to promote the integration of institutional research. Our overarching argument is that metatheoretical debate about institutions has run its course and must now give way to theoretical, methodological, and carefully structured empirical dialogue. To this end, we offer specific strategies for promoting greater synthesis among competing institutional schools.

International relations theory and multilateralism: the search for foundations

Why has the concept of multilateralism not played a more prominent role in theories of international relations? The prima facie case for the importance of multilateral activity in the international realm would seem great. The world, we constantly tell ourselves, is increasingly drawn together. The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck argues that most external effects of production and consumption are external not only to the household but also to the country in which they occur. According to many different indicators, interdependence is on the increase in nearly all parts of the world. International political economists talk about global indivisibilities, ranging from peace to pollution. Most important international problems-including pollution, energy, managing airline traffic, and maintaining rules for trade and investment-intrinsically involve many countries simultaneously. What makes a problem international is that often it cannot be dealt with effectively within the national arena. Costs and benefits spill into the external arena. These external effects are frequently so great that domestic goals cannot be accomplished without coordinated multilateral action.

Dependence, dependency, and power in the global system: a structural and behavioral analysis

Although there is already a huge literature on dependence in international relations, many fundamental conceptual issues remain unresolved. Is the pattern of dependence of advanced industrial states on one another different in kind or only in degree from the dependence of peripheral capitalist societies on other members of the global system? What are the essential components of dependence that one must identify before constructing an adequate measure of it? What is the relationship between dependence and power? Since the answer to the first question is that the two patterns of dependence differ in kind, the first order of business is to provide the grounds for this distinction. Dependence is the pattern of external reliance of well-integrated nation-states on one another while dependency, which is closer to the dependencia tradition, involves a more complex set of relations centering on the incorporation of less developed, less homogeneous societies into the global division of labor. The conceptual components of dependence are the size of ones reliance on another, the importance attached to the goods involved, and the availability of these goods (or substitutes) from different sources. The components of dependency are the magnitude of foreign supply of important factors of production (technology, capital), limited developmental choices, and domestic “distortion†measures. Finally, the concept of dependence is most easily integrated into bargaining analyses while dependency is more fruitfully applied to analyses of the structure of relations among societies.

Polanyi in Brussels: Supranational Institutions and the Transnational Embedding of Markets

Many have argued that the success of European integration is predicated on reinforcing market structures and some have gone further to state that the creation of a transnational market results in a decoupling of markets from their national political and social frameworks, thus threatening to unravel historical social bargains. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Ruggie and using their insights regarding the social embedding of markets, we dissent from this view by examining how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has handled a key sector of the emerging European market—labor mobility. We argue that rather than disembedding markets, decisions of the ECJ—just as Polanyi and Ruggie would have predicted—activate new social and political arrangements. We find evidence for the development of a new legal and political structure, largely inspired by the Court but also imbricated in European Union legislation, at the regional level.

Across the Great Divide: Integrating Comparative and International Politics

Research in comparative and international politics often deals with the same questions, such as the nature of war, the conduct of foreign economic policy, and the consequences of different political institutions. Yet there is a pronounced gap between these two subfields of political science. In neorealist theory, this gap is to be expected, since the structure of the international system cannot be reduced to facts about its component units. Given the incompleteness of international relations theory, it rarely provides knowledge that is sufficient to explain the actions of the component units. This theoretical insufficiency provides the motivation to bring theories of domestic and international politics closer together. Three attempts to integrate comparative and international politics are discussed in this article. The first derives from the logic of two-level games as originally advanced by Robert Putnam. The second relies on a special application of second-image reversed theory by Ronald Rogowski in Commerce and Coalitions. The third examines the merging of previously distinctive systems of rules and laws among countries in the European Union. This approach does not rely on a single exemplar (as do the first two) but uses a number of institutional and legal theories to conceptualize the domestification of a regional, international political system. Thus, strategic interaction, the domestic effects of international trade flows, and institutional merging of legal systems provide three quite different metaphors for narrowing the gap between our knowledge of domestic and of international politics.

Regional integration theory: understanding our past and anticipating our future

ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the field of European integration studies, a product of four years of collaboration within the ‘Laguna Beach Project.’ This project, co-organized by Alec Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz, will be published as Supranational Governance: The Institutionalization of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Three themes are explored in this article: the growing importance of institutions in the EU over time; the changing relevance of different theories, especially reflected in the increasing importance of comparative politics approaches; and an assessment of the current theoretical debate, contrasting several competing theories with the approach outlined in the book. While the EU has experienced profound changes over the last five decades, it is often unnoticed that its scholarly counterpart has changed in important ways too.

Theories of political economy: Neoclassical political economy

The time since the publication of Adam Smiths Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 to the present day spans over two hundred years. Although there are important elements of continuity from Smith to the present world, neoclassical economics is not just a modern, updated version of classical political economy. The beginnings of the neoclassical system are placed in the 1870s with the rise of marginalist economics. Before the 1870s economics as a system of thought was dominated by the classical agenda: growth, distribution, and the labor theory of value. After the 1870s, this agenda changed in important ways, although it did not change overnight. To simplify a complex chapter in this history of economic thought, the marginalist revolution succeeded in doing two things. First, it advanced a theory of value grounded in the intensity of subjective feelings (subjective utility theory). And second, it developed the marginal calculus as a powerful conceptual and methodological tool. The upshot of these two developments was that, over the span of the next three to four decades, the emerging neoclassical consensus succeeded in replacing the labor theory of value with one grounded in subjective utility and placed the ideas of “marginal product” and “final demand” at the center while elbowing into the wings the concepts of total product and total demand. With these new ideas gathering momentum as they spread during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the economy came to be thought of less in terms of material production and reproduction and more as a logic of human action.

Dependency theory: continuities and discontinuities in development studies

Interpretations in this book attempt to characterize, in a general manner, the history of that diversity [i.e. diversity of domestic conditions, of local class structures, state organization, and of the timing and mode of insertion into the global system]. Of course, there are common factors in capitalism which affect all economies under consideration and which constitute the starting point of the analysis. But it is the diversity within unity [emphasis mine] that explains historical process. Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1978),

The dual nature of European identity: subjective awareness and coherence

We conceptualize European identity as a dual concept (subjective awareness and coherence) that contains both perceptual and behavioral components. We provide a set of indicators for European identity and analyze the data to assess changes in European identity over the last 50 years. Our goal is to offer a conceptual framework and method of assessing identity in an empirically sensitive way. Our findings show that EU citizens have multiple identities of which EU identity is part and that there is strong evidence for the development of a coherent EU. We suggest that future research pay attention to a broader range of indicators than examined here.

Still a regulatory state? The European Union and the financial crisis

ABSTRACT The European Union (EU) has been conceptualized as a regulatory state, i.e., an emerging polity that differs from the classic Westphalian state. Unable to engage in redistribution and stabilization, the EU has specialized in a range of regulatory functions related to market creation and management of externalities. We argue that the European financial crisis is pushing the EU to move beyond regulation. We explore the origins of and responses to the crisis, and examine the ways in which the crisis is creating pressures for stabilization and fiscal policy. Indeed, we argue that significant inroads into these areas have already been made and further changes in the direction of stabilization and fiscal policy are likely, though whether such competences are centralized or decentralized is an open question.