Political Integration as a Multidimensional Phenomenon Requiring Multivariate Measurement

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.