Political Integration as a Multidimensional Phenomenon Requiring Multivariate Measurement

Leon N. Lindberg

International Organization, 1970, vol. 24, issue 4, 648-731

Abstract: 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.

Date: 1970
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:intorg:v:24:y:1970:i:04:p:648-731_01

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Organization from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().