functionalism
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functionalism, an approach to the formation of international organizations that advocates international cooperation on scientific, humanitarian, social, and economic issues.
Functional cooperation in the United Nations
Functionalists argue that mutual trust and habits of cooperation between governments are more likely to develop through the sharing of discrete public-sector responsibilities, or functions (e.g., collecting meteorological data, coordinating international air-traffic control, the prevention of pandemic diseases, and promoting sustainable development), rather than through attempts to cooperate on more sensitive issues such as citizenship, monetary union, or national defense. The central feature of the functional approach is the creation of international agencies with limited and specific powers defined by the function that they perform. Functional agencies operate only within the territories of the states that choose to join them and do not therefore threaten state sovereignty.
Typical examples of the functional approach in operation are specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN) such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the World Health Organization (WHO), each of which has nearly global membership. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are also based on functional principles. The UN Charter makes explicit reference, in Article 55, to promoting conditions of stability and the promotion of higher living standards, economic and social progress, and development. Functionalism therefore underpins the UN system’s entire range of activities outside of the collective security role.
The period of 1945 to 1975 represented the most successful period for the application of the functional approach, when a broad consensus about the theories of John Maynard Keynes on the provision of international public goods in sectors prone to market failure prevailed (see also Keynesian economics). The last quarter of the 20th century, however, proved to be problematic. Political disputes occasionally disturbed the technocratic rationale of the agencies. The rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also challenged the democratic credentials of the agencies. In addition, globalization in the form of privatization, deregulation, and marketization has challenged the public-sector monopoly basis on which the original functional scheme relied. At the turn of the 21st century, the combined growth of global civil society and the transnational business sector appeared to progressively narrow the range of services historically and uniquely associated with the functional agencies.
Neofunctionalism
New functional issues such as combating HIV/AIDS and promoting wider access to information technologies arose but were predicted to most likely combine the traditional role of the functional agencies with NGO and corporate partnerships.
A variant form of functionalism, known as neofunctionalism, has been applied at a regional level to explain the early stages in the formation of those institutions that later evolved to form the European Union (EU). The European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) were initially limited to technical, scientific, and tariff-reduction mandates. Considerable disputes among academic and policy communities ensued as attempts were made to use these original limited, functional successes to advance the larger quasi-federal project of the EU. Key indicators of quasi-federal integration—that is, using functional methods to advance federalist objectives—may be detected in the 2002 adoption of the euro as the euro zone’s single currency and subsequent attempts to create a common foreign and defense policy.
Other regional organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) explicitly limited their cooperation to functional issues by emphasizing the sovereignty of their members and doctrines of noninterference in each other’s internal affairs.
Rationale for functionalism
David Mitrany, a Romanian-born British scholar, was most closely associated with promoting a functional approach. Mitrany was employed in the British Foreign Office during World War II, planning postwar reconstruction, and was inspired in part by the New Deal public works programs of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Mitrany was also influenced by observing the elaborate processes of interallied collaboration made in preparation for the Normandy Invasion and the plans for the postwar administration of Europe. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was an example of a new institution providing a particular public service that was separated from the territorial basis of state authority. In the TVA case, seven state governments renounced their authority over the river-watershed and agreed to create one specific agency to develop and execute an ambitious plan of dam construction, hydraulic engineering, electricity generation, and job creation in an area subject to regular flood damage. Mitrany advocated the creation of a range of similarly constituted technical and scientific agencies with potentially global reach to implement infrastructure and reconstruction programs, organized on a technical or functional basis rather than on a territorial basis.
Many of the specialized agencies actually predate Mitrany’s writing and the formation of the UN. An earlier variety of so-called public international unions, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) founded in 1865 and the Universal Postal Union created in 1875, sought both to promote and to regulate these new technologies. In 1919 the creation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) institutionalized a role for organized labour within international human rights standard setting. The contribution of Mitrany’s writing and advocacy was to promote the expansion of both the number and tasks of the existing agencies, the creation of new ones, and their coordination through the auspices of the UN. The construction of what Mitrany called “a working peace system” lay in a twofold process. In the first place, a program would be progressively transferred to functional agencies, a process called “task expansion.” This process would enlarge the mandate and competence of the agencies relative to those of national governments. Thereafter, the network of interdependent relationships that these agencies would come to manage, a process called spillover, would create a so-called working peace system between the members.
This argument matured later in many writers on regime theory during the 1970s and after. Those writers often described the process of enlarging the competence of the agencies in terms of international organizations progressively acquiring normative, rule-creating, rule-enforcing, and finally programmatic responsibilities. For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), founded in 1956, gradually expanded its tasks from low-key technical assistance to the extraordinary legal powers of inspections developed under the auspices of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The safeguards system administered by the IAEA in countries around the world is the most fully developed example of a functional scheme of regulation. Mitrany also argued that the agencies could apply sanctions to countries that were judged to be acting contrary to international law. Again, the IAEA is a good example through its role in the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) program to detect and destroy Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons program after 1991.
After 1945 the focus of creating new functional agencies shifted from scientific cooperation toward economic development. In addition to the Bretton Woods organizations founded in 1944, subsidiary agencies such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of 1956 and International Development Association (IDA) of 1960 represented task expansion for the World Bank group. Further specialization occurred with the creation of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in 1967. These agencies and programs were deliberately created to segregate functional cooperation from political and security disputes conducted in the UN General Assembly and Security Council. However, this attempt to distinguish and segregate a technical-managerial approach to the functional agencies, as if a category of low politics could be kept separate from high politics, proved problematic in the later development of the functional agencies. After 1970, when the Global South (i.e., developing countries, typically of the Southern Hemisphere) acquired a voting majority in the UN General Assembly and on the governing boards of the specialized agencies, their mandates were increasingly adapted to developmental priorities. In this way, task expansion and spillover acquired new meanings to promote and to disseminate multilateral aid programs. The agencies also became subject to increasingly political disputes in defining their scope of operations.
Critique of functionalism
The functional scheme was created for a planned recovery and reconstruction in the post-1945 international order. The Anglo-American parentage of specialized agencies derived partly from the U.S. New Deal model clearly identified them as agencies of Keynesian intervention. Although functionalism is widely acknowledged as an influence in founding the post-1945 system of economic, technical and welfare cooperation, the approach has also attracted criticism. Critics questioned the basic assumption that it is possible to separate functional and political issues and so insulate functional cooperation from political disputes between member states. They argued that peace creates the conditions for functional cooperation between states, rather than functional cooperation creating the peace.
Some scholars have also suggested that functionalism relied too much on an almost deterministic belief in the ability of technical solutions to resolve political disputes. Mitrany’s writings are certainly embedded in what was to become known as modernization theory. Faith in scientific progress was a core liberal value of the mid-20th century. Mitrany wrote in an era yet to encounter postmodernism, environmentalism, and other constraints on developmental imperatives and faith in scientific progress.
Finally, the UN system of creating numerous development agencies charged with separate functional responsibilities has been criticized as creating counterproductive sectional divides. This “sectionalism” has created problems of coordination, duplication, and bureaucratic competition, which have been the subject of numerous academic and internal debates on reform and efficiency.
In addition to these methodological criticisms, the functional approach has also been subject to ideological, political criticism. As the period of liberal multilateralism, 1945 to 1975, began to break down, the New Deal lineage left the functional agencies vulnerable to critics of both the right and the left. For conservatives whose criticisms dominated the 1980s, the agencies were too closely tied to a social-democratic model promoting a bureaucratic and welfare-oriented vision of the public sector.
The agencies attracted substantial criticism after 1975 from successive U.S. administrations. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s correspondence with the ILO in 1975 alleged extraneous political decisions and failures of due process. The United States withdrew from the ILO between 1977 and 1980 and briefly suspended its participation in the IAEA from 1982 to 1983. In both cases, U.S. criticism turned crucially on accusations that the agencies were adopting discriminatory practices against Israel’s rights to participation. The United States left the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the last day of 1984, citing a wider range of issues concerning budgetary efficiency, overlapping programs, and limited pace of reforms. The U.S. absence from UNESCO continued for more than 15 years, until a review initiated under Pres. Bill Clinton led to Pres. George W. Bush choosing to rejoin in 2003. The agencies were in turn subject to criticism from the left during the 1990s, especially the Bretton Woods financial institutions, on the grounds that, as agents of globalization, they were neglecting their mandates in poverty reduction and environmental protection. In 2020 U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, alleging that the WHO had mismanaged the global response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (see coronavirus), announced that the United States would withdraw from the agency in 2021.
The uncertain future of functionalism
Taken collectively, these criticisms limit rather than refute the functional model. The agencies have been in existence since the mid-20th century. They were created, funded, and mandated by a nearly universal membership of sovereign governments. This suggests that most member states continue to view the agencies as valuable instruments to further multilateral policy goals.
However, the accelerated pace of globalization after 1990 has eroded many distinctive characteristics of the functional approach. The size and scope of the public sector in many countries has been greatly reduced by privatization, deregulation, and marketization. Therefore, some of the functions associated with public-sector provision and, hence, intergovernmental cooperation have passed into the private sector. Intellectual property rights and advanced research in fields of potential international regulation such as computing and information technology and genetically modified organisms are located in the private sector. Other social changes since 1975 have further eroded the Keynesian consensus on welfare in the Western democracies and with it the incentive to sustain international cooperation in these fields. The decline of trade unionism and collective bargaining across the Western world, particularly in the United States, has led to the weakening of the ILO’s central task of promoting collective bargaining rights. The declining role of official development assistance in the developing world, and the decline of public-sector-led models of economic planning, has led to a downgrading of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and other developmental agencies. The decline in civil nuclear-power-plant orders after the Chernobyl accident (1986) constrained the promotional and developmental aspects of the IAEA mandate at a time when that agency’s safety role and Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty safeguard responsibilities acquired greater significance, in relation to North Korea and Iran.
On the other hand, new functional tasks emerged during and after the 1990s, in which continued instances of market failure and the lack of incentives for cooperation continued to create the need for multilateral agreements, most obviously in environmental regulation. The Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement were each serviced and enforced by agencies established on functional principles. Issues such as the international control of pandemic disease have been thrust into new levels of activity—most notably on COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.
Mark F. Imber The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica