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The fate of neofunctionalist theorizing of European integration has closely followed the course of the integration process itself. The initial conception of neofunctionalism by, most notably, Ernst Haas and Leon Lindberg followed directly on the establishment of the European Communities in the 1950s. As European cooperation stagnated in the late 1960s and 1970s, neofunctionalism went out of vogue. Then when integration accelerated again from the late 1980s onwards, various political scientists, like Sandholtz and Stone Sweet, Mattli and Tranholm-Mikkelsen, turned again to neofunctionalism. Against this background, Arne Niemann's new book appears as the latest update of neofunctionalism in light of the developments of the late 1990s and the early 21st century, up until the preparations of the European Constitutional Treaty.
Neofunctionalism aspires to offer an explanatory account of the evolution of international cooperation. With its predecessor functionalism it maintains that international cooperation occurs as a response to functional challenges that are better served by international cooperation than by states alone. However, it deviates from functionalism in that it suggests that once international institutions are put in place, they themselves come to play a crucial driving role in setting the stage for new steps in the cooperation process. The crucial concept here is 'spillover': each step in the cooperation process is likely to trigger spillovers that call for further international action.
Niemannn opens his book by outlining a revised framework of neofunctionalism that builds on the original theories of Haas and Lindberg but takes account of the whole range of criticisms that neofunctionalism has attracted over the decades. In Niemann's revised version, neofunctionalism is liberated from some of its all too restraining assumptions. In particular, he drops the automaticity by which spillover is taken to drive the integration process forward and the teleological assumption that this process inevitably is to lead to a new, supranational 'political community'. However, the essence of Niemann's revision lies in his reworking of the spillover menu by introducing systematic distinctions between the various forms spillover may take, specifying in greater detail the exact mechanisms at work, and introducing some new mechanisms.
Eventually, Niemann comes to distinguish between five forms of spillover. First, he differentiates 'functional spillover' through functional pressures and efficiency considerations from 'political spillover' in which political lobbies by interest groups are crucial. Drawing on social constructivist analyses of European cooperation, he also recognizes the potential role of socialization and learning processes under the heading of 'social spillover'. Furthermore, he identifies the role of European political entrepreneurs, like the Commission but also the Council Presidency and the European Court of Justice, as potentially contributing to 'cultivated spillover', and he recognizes the role of the wider global context in which European integration takes place under the label of 'exogenous spillover'. Whereas all five classes of spillover contribute to further integration, they may be counterbalanced by another new element that Niemann introduces into the neofunctionalist framework: countervailing forces.
The bulk of the book is then dedicated to three extensive case studies of EU policy development to which this revised framework is applied: the emergence and development of the PHARE assistance programme for states in Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1997, the reform of the EU's Common Commercial Policy, and the development of a communitarized visa, asylum and immigration policy. The latter two cases are further broken down in three sub-cases around the Treaty revisions in the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Treaty of Nice, and the Constitutional Treaty.
The case studies are extensively researched with each potential spillover mechanism being revisited for each step in the evolution of the policy areas covered and Niemann gleans some interesting insights from the more than 120 interviews that he conducted. At times, however, the systematic revisiting of each spillover mechanism for each (sub-)case verges on the obligatory. This is especially the case when there is a shortage of concrete evidence from the case at hand on the mechanism to be dealt with, and Niemann turns to general theoretical arguments and secondary literature on related issues to support his argument. For instance, when examining social spillover in the case of the PHARE programme, Niemann gives an extensive exposition of 'communicative action' with only limited and circumstantial evidence that bears on the actual programme.
Obviously, Niemann's revised framework is much more comprehensive than the original neofunctionalist accounts. Indeed, his framework seems to allow for pigeonholing any factor conducive or detrimental to European integration as either a form of 'spillover' or a 'countervailing force'. However, this comprehensiveness comes at the price of loosing much of the discriminatory power of the theory. For one, the concept of spillover is simply reduced to any factor that may contribute to further integration. This becomes particularly problematic in the case of the concept of 'exogenous spillover', which would be considered an oxymoron by classical neofunctionalists as they emphatically introduced spillover as a logic endogenous to the integration process. Also the explanatory value of some of the mechanisms sometimes verges on the tautological. Thus among the countervailing forces Niemann distinguishes a 'negative integrative climate' (which raises the question whether fairness would not require the introduction of a 'positive climate spillover' on the other side of the equation) and 'sovereignty-consciousness' of member states. Obviously both factors are not conducive to integration. However, they tend to beg the explanatory question.
More generally, Niemann's framework comes close to ending up as a 'balance sheet approach' in which his spillover concepts serve as baskets to add up the various factors for and against integration in any given situation. It remains however unclear what common denominator allows the aggregation of the factors and whatever weights are to be assigned to them. Typically, his framework issues in conclusions of the following kind: '"medium" countervailing pressures were "overcome" by strong dynamics [i.e. "spillovers" BC], which led to considerably progressive results' (p. 233) (in this case concerning the changes in visa, asylum and immigration policy in the 1996–1997 Amsterdam IGC). Only after the fact, in the concluding chapter, Niemann gets to a tentative assessment of the different forms of spillover. There he suggests that functional and cultivated spillovers are of paramount importance, followed by social spillover. Exogenous spillover is taken to play a more secondary role, while Niemann finds the significance of political spillover 'challenged most severely' (p. 300).
Eventually, in Niemann's hands neofunctionalism looses its distinctive theoretical edge which highlighted the crucial role of a limited number of factors in the integration process, in particular the self-perpetuating power of the supranational institutions already in place, operating either by their own efforts (most notably of the Commission) or by the opportunities they create for other actors to upgrade their focus of attention to the European level. Most notably, Niemann no longer sees the need to distinguish neofunctionalism from its long-time opponent: intergovernmentalism. Instead, by including nation states' 'sovereignty consciousness' as one of the countervailing forces, he seeks to incorporate the tension between functional requirements and member states' preoccupation with national autonomy that is at the heart of intergovernmental accounts of European integration. Arguably, as Niemann suggests following others, the intergovernmentalist–neofunctionalist debate has been overdrawn. Still, this debate has been the very productive engine of large segments of integration studies as the two theories offer clearly opposing accounts of which actors and mechanisms drive the integration process. In contrast, Niemann's framework leaves no opponent whatsoever as it is committed to incorporate any rival account.
After more than 50 years of European integration, neofunctionalism's intuition that integration creates its own self-sustaining momentum retains a definite appeal. At the same time, it is obvious that if the theory is to keep its relevance in the 21st century, some revisions, extensions and qualifications are inevitable. Arne Niemann demonstrates an astute knowledge of the potential and the limits of classical neofunctionalism. He also shows how neofunctionalism is not only compatible with many recent insights in European integration studies but can indeed serve as a wider theoretical framework in which they can be connected. However, his ambitious aspiration to resuscitate neofunctionalism falls short in two respects. First, as indicated, in the process he looses much of neofunctionalism's distinctive edge as a theory that focussed our attention on certain factors rather than others, and turns it into a rather generic framework of analysis instead.
Secondly, just like his classical predecessors, he ultimately leaves one crucial factor under-theorized: politicization. Indirectly politicization does enter in Niemann's framework through his inclusion of 'domestic constraints' as a potential countervailing force. However, the demise of what the classical neofunctionalists called the 'permissive consensus' among European publics concerning the integration process operates not only through individual domestic contexts. It needs to be considered as a much broader pan-European development that has proven infectious across borders. To the extent that European integration has raised the attention of the public, the fate of further steps towards integration has become the object of citizens' choices in elections and referendums. With anxious politicians vying for electoral support, a more radical rethinking of the conditions under which spillover mechanisms prevail seems to be required. After the events that led to the demise of the Constitutional Treaty and its partial resurrection as the Lisbon Reform Treaty, which took place after the conclusion of Niemann's analysis, neofunctionalism seems already in for a further round of revisions.
