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A Paradigm for the Study of Political Unification*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Amitai Etzioni
Amitai Etzioni
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

A Paradigm is more than a perspective but less than a theory. It provides a set of interrelated questions, but no hypothetical answers or account of validated propositions. It provides a “language,” a net of variables, but it does not specify the relationships among the parameters of these variables. It is less vague than a mere perspective, providing an ordered, specific, and often logically exhaustive and tightly ordered focus for research and speculation. A paradigm is often a stage on the way from an old perspective to a new theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , October 1962 , pp. 44 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1962

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References

1 Two paradigms that had a lasting impact on sociology have been constructed by Robert K. Merton, one for functional analysis and one for the study of sociology of knowledge. See his Social Theory and Social Structure (rev. ed., Glencoe, Ill., 1957).

2 Most functional models deal only with the conditions under which a collectivity survives. I spelled out elsewhere the need to study the conditions under which a collectivity maintains its form or structure (or, in the case of organization, its level of effectiveness). See Etzioni, , “Two Approaches to Organizational Analysis: A Critique and a Suggestion,” Administrative Science Quarterly, V (September 1960), 257–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Kaplan, Morton A., System and Process in International Politics (New York 1957), 4.Google Scholar

4 Cf. Parsons, Talcott, “Polarization and the Problem of International Order,” Berkley Journal of Sociology, VI (Spring 1961), 130ff.Google Scholar

5 The League of Nations and the UN differ from most international organizations on so many counts that they should be treated as a distinct category.

6 Following Max Weber, “authority” is defined as legitimate power.

7 See Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., “The Organization of the Communist Camp,” World Politics, XIII (January 1961), 175–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Soviet Bloc (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

8 An hypothesis emerges from this comparison: the broader the scope of an international system in terms of the number of sectors (e.g., economic, cultural) included, and the more significant they are to its survival and goals, the more integrated the system is on all three counts of integration (monopoly, decision-making, and focusing of identification). I return to this point below.

9 This should not be viewed as a table of contents, since conceptual digressions are not included.

10 Haas, Ernst B., The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950–1957 (Stanford 1958)Google Scholar, passim.

11 Gordon, Lincoln, “Economic Regionalism Reconsidered,” World Politics, XIII (January 1961), 235–36.Google Scholar

12 Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Menzel, Herbert, “On the Relation Between Individual and Collective Properties,” in Etzioni, Amitai, ed., Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader (New York 1961), 422–40, esp. 427.Google Scholar

13 On this property, see Deutsch, Karl W. and others, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton 1957), 62, 66ffGoogle Scholar; Haas, Ernst B., “International Integration: The European and the Universal Process,” International Organization, XV (Summer 1961), 374–75, 378.Google Scholar

14 See Dewar, Margaret, “Economic Cooperation in the Soviet Orbit,” Yearbook of World Affairs (London 1959), 45–61.Google Scholar

15 “The Emerging Common Markets in Latin America,” Monthly Review (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) (September 1960), 156.

16 Padelford, Norman J., “Cooperation in the Central American Region: The Organization of Central American States,” International Organization, XI (Winter 1957), 46.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 50.

18 For a fine study of this rather exceptional form of international association, see Miller, J. D. B., The Commonwealth in the World (Cambridge, Mass., 1958).Google Scholar

19 Deutsch and others, 44–46.

20 On the pre-EFTA period, see Wendt, Frantz, The Nordic Council and Co-operation in Scandinavia (Copenhagen 1959).Google Scholar

21 See Gunther Eyck, F., The Benelux Countries: An Historical Survey (Princeton 1959), 87ff.Google Scholar

22 Cash, W. J., Mind of the South (New York 1960).Google Scholar

23 Camps, Miriam, Division in Europe, Policy Memorandum No. 21 (Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1960), 50.Google Scholar

24 The Arab League was sufficiently affected by the vogue to review twice the suggestion to form an Arabic common market. New York Times, October 12, 1958; Arab News and Views, July 1, 1961.

25 This is not an instance of pure diffusion, since all commissions are UN organs, but without a “vogue”—based on diffusion—they would hardly be so acceptable to the various countries represented. For another instance of diffusion, see Padelford, 43.

28 See Gordon, 245–50.

27 For additional comments on the integration of the international systems in this stage, see the delineation of the subject above.

28 Culture being viewed in the broadest sense of the term, including religion, secular ideologies, civilization, language, arts, etc.

29 Karl W. Deutsch and others, Backgrounds for Community (in progress).

30 This classification is extensively discussed in my Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (Glencoe, Ill., 1961).

31 Types of union are discussed in the last section of this article.

32 The answer depends in part on the criterion of success that one chooses to use. A union can be maintained, at least in the short run, by extensive use of force. How effective it is, in terms of the level of integration attained, the scope of the unification, or resistance to external hostile powers, are different questions altogether.

33 Deutsch and others, Political Community, 50ff. See also Deutsch, Karl W., Nationalism and Social Communication (New York 1953).Google Scholar

34 Up to now neither of these countries appears to have used its superior power to gain special concessions from the EEC authorities.

35 The frequency of forced integrations as distinct from voluntary ones has been pointed out by Crane Brinton in From Many One (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). See also Lasswell, Harold D., “The Interrelations of World Organization and Society,” Yale Law Review, LV (August 1946), 889–909.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 See Wallerstein, Immanuel, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York 1961), 108, 116.Google Scholar

37 New York, Times, April 29 and 30, 1961; and The Reporter, July 20, 1961.

38 Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Background to Page Paper II,” West Africa, August 5, 1961, 861.Google Scholar

39 Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)Google Scholar, chap. 4; Deutsch, and others, Political Community, 83–85Google Scholar; and Haas, , “The Challenge of Regionalism,” International Organization, XII (Autumn 1958), 440–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 See Rostow, 52, on “derived-growth sectors.”

41 Diebold, William Jr, “The Changed Economic Position of Western Europe,” International Organization, XIV (Winter 1960), 12ff.Google Scholar

42 Haas provides a most stimulating and insightful analysis of this process in Uniting of Europe, esp. chap. 8.

43 Deutsch, and others, Political Community. 71.Google Scholar

44 Kissinger, Henry A., “For an Atlantic Confederacy,” The Reporter, February 2, 1961, 16–21.Google Scholar See also his Necessity for Choice (New York 1960), 165–68.

45 “International Integration,” 372ff.

46 For a review of this approach, see Goodspeed, Stephen S., The Nature and Functions of International Organization (New York 1959), 505–6.Google Scholar

47 Deutsch, and others, Political Community, 30.Google Scholar

48 Deutsch and his associates use “integration” to refer to the relationship among countries that no longer consider engaging in war with each other (ibid., 31). This is of course a different definition, one that has a lower threshold, than ours. Haas uses “political integration” to refer to “the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new center, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states” (Uniting of Europe, 16). The threshold of this definition is much higher than that of Deutsch, almost as high as ours. Cf. Haas's discussion of “political community” in ibid., 4–11.

49 We defined “political communities” above as systems that have reached a high level of integration on three dimensions (monopolization, decision-making, identification). Since the discussion suggests that such integration tends to exist in unions that penetrate all the major societal sectors, the question arises as to what these sectors are. Following Parsons, we suggest that a full collectivity is one that solves autonomously its four basic functional problems: it adapts to its ecological and social environment, allocates means and rewards among its subunits, integrates its subunits into one polity, and establishes as well as reinforces the normative commitments of its members. A union that matured into a political community would thus include “supranational” activities of all four types.

50 This point is considerably elaborated in my “Epigenesis of Nation-Unions,” American Journal of Sociology (fordicoming).

51 Goodspeed, 591.

52 Political Community, 71.

53 The length of the period is, like all such “cut-off” points, largely an arbitrary decision of the researcher, affected more by the scope of his study and problem than by “reality.”

54 One reason such a relation is expected is that actors in earlier stages sometimes view the termination stage as the goal toward which their efforts are directed.

55 This is, of course, the central thesis of David Riesman and others, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven 1950).

56 Underlying this statement is the idea that, over the last 75 years, the United States moved from the adaptive to the allocative, social integrative, and normative integrative phase. It is derived from Talcott Parsons' treatment of the subject, “A Revised Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification,” in Bendix, Reinhard and Lipset, Seymour M., eds., Class, Status, and Power (Glencoe, Ill., 1953), 92–129.Google Scholar See also Parsons, , “‘McCarthyism’ and American Social Tension: A Sociologist's View,” Yale Review, XLIV (December 1954), 226–45.Google Scholar

57 The stress on the need to shift resources from private to collective consumption is championed by Galbraith, J. K. in American Capitalism (Boston 1952)Google Scholar and The Affluent Society (Boston 1958).

58 This is a central thesis of Kennan's, GeorgeThe Sources of Soviet Conduct: American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago 1951).Google Scholar