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 ?

I view international political integration as a distinctive aspect of the more inclusive process (international integration, generally) whereby larger groupings emerge or are created among nations without the use of violence. Such groupings can be said to exist at a variety of different analytical levels. At each level we can conceive of a number of nations linked to each other in certain salient ways. For example, their populations may be linked by feelings of mutual amity, confidence, and identification. Or their leaders may hold more or less reliable expectations, which may or may not be shared by the populations, that common problems will be resolved without recourse to large-scale violence. Or a grouping might be defined as an area which is characterized by intense concentrations of economic exchange or the free circulation of productive factors (labor, capital, services). In describing these phenomena we speak of social community, security community, and of economic union. Political integration can be said to occur when the linkage consists of joint participation in regularized, ongoing decisionmaking. The perspective taken here is that international political integration involves a group of nations coming to regularly make and implement binding public decisions by means of collective institutions and/or processes rather than by formally autonomous national means. Political integration implies that a number of governments begin to create and to use common resources to be committed in the pursuit of certain common objectives and that they do so by foregoing some of the factual attributes of sovereignty and decisionmaking autonomy, in contrast to more classical modes of cooperation such as alliances or international organizations.

The relevance of transaction analysis to the study of regional integration has been the subject of controversy. In dialectical fashion though, this controversy has produced improved understanding. Early exponents, who tended at times to overestimate the efficacy of the transaction approach, have accepted its limitations, and, by the same token, some early critics of transaction analysis have accepted its usefulness. Overall, we have come to recognize that regional integration is a multidimensional phenomenon, much more complex than initially imagined. Transaction approaches are appropriate and useful for investigating some aspects of regional integration; they are less useful for investigating others.

For the time being, at least, survey data is relevant to the study of regional integration chiefly insofar as it gives an indication of the influence of the public (and various elite groups) on the decisions of the respective national governments—and vice versa. As integration progresses in given regions our focus may change, and we may become primarily interested in the degree to which given groups direct support or demands toward supranational institutions. But for the present the basic question seems to be:

To what extent do public preferences constitute an effective influence on a given set of national decisionmakers, encouraging them to make decisions which increase (or diminish) regional integration?

There are several approaches to regional integration, both in actor's strategies and in academic analysis. One of the pioneering political science efforts at providing a causal model of regional integration was developed under the stimulus of events in Western Europe in the late 1950's and not surprisingly it reflects these origins. We will refer to it as academic neo-functionalism.

The study of regional integration, of how national units come to share part or all of their decisional authority with an emerging international organization, is one of the areas of political inquiry in which a cumulative research tradition has developed. Previous paradigms are scrutinized critically in new settings; replications are made and even encouraged; new concepts, hypotheses, and measures are suggested and incorporated without obliterating past work. Under these conditions theoretical formalization may play a particularly fruitful role.

Compelling as mathematical representations may seem to some interested in the “automaticity” of integration processes, to other empirical theorists they seem anything but obviously relevant. Yet there is a clear trend toward greater use of formal reasoning in both measurement and modeling work on integration processes. Juxtaposing a variety of such integration logics—the mathematical formulae and conceptual abstractions incorporated in assessments of integration progress and regress—should help achieve the major purpose of this article: to introduce students to a variety of possible integration logics, some of their possible interrelationships, and the limitations of some of the simpler ones vis-à-vis current verbal theories of the integration process.

The literature on integration has expanded tremendously during the last decade. This growing interest in the problems and processes of integration is particularly marked in two areas, studies of international regional integration and studies of national integration. On the whole, these efforts have been carried out with very little reference to each other. What is striking, nonetheless, is the similarity of much of the material and the relevance of work in one area for conceptualization and theory building in the other. As one who has been concerned primarily with national political integration I would like to delineate some of the major similarities and differences between the foci of national and regional integration studies, to suggest the utility of thinking in terms of a common conceptualization of political integration, and to discuss the relevance of some aspects of the work on national integration for regional theory and research.

It is generally recognized that the last decade or so witnessed a proliferation of studies dealing with different aspects of regional integration. While most of them discussed the origin and history of various international organizations, some, especially those of a more recent vintage, ventured into the thicket of theory building in an effort to engage eventually in some kind of comparative analysis.

The purpose of this article is to suggest that the perspective of scholars studying regional integration be broadened to include research expressly concerned with the consequences of integration and to indicate the directions that such efforts might take. To date, the students of integration have been mainly describing, analyzing, and measuring the integration process. This is true of research on the European Communities as well as of studies of integration elsewhere in Europe and on other continents. In our quest for political community we have utilized a number of different research strategies and focused on a broad range of indicators, but our primary concern has been with regional capacities for aggregating political authority.