Oldal 37 [37]
Integration and disintegration | 35
Fourthly, all these integrations are strengthened by developing common
social values, which become more and more similar in Member States’
societies. For example, respect for democracy or tolerance are relatively
broadly shared values across Europe. One reason for this is that good practices
are available and widely shared on the continent.
Of course, integration of social values can also have negative effects: one
only has to think about the cooperation among far-right forces, or the spread
of xenophobia from one country to another. Similarly, a negative consequence
of integration can be the creation of transnational organised crime groups,
which also share knowledge and practices among themselves. At this point,
we have to stress that integration is not the same as creating a completely
unified continent, but it is more about certain common values shared by
many - or most - of the countries in Europe.
Based on the integration of, and interdependencies among European
nations, a new vocabulary of integration has also been created. This change
could be interpreted as some kind of a “linguistic integration. If Member
States share power to regulate something in a less stringent way, we talk
about ‘harmonisation’ If the EU adopts strict rules, which must be applied
all over the Union, we talk about ‘unification. Under ‘convergence’ we mean
that countries start to regulate certain issues in a similar way, while under
‘divergence’ we mean that they start to regulate issues differently, even if there
was unity in their practices before. The terms ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’
are mostly applied in the fields of law or economics. Furthermore, when
we use the phrase ‘differentiated (two/multispeed) integration, we mostly
understand this to refer to certain countries integrating in a closer way, while
others do so in a looser way.
THE SCHOLARSHIP OF INTEGRATION
Science also tried to model the integration of European countries.* In
academia, divergent approaches towards integration started to compete
with each other, all of which highlighted different aspects of integration.
One reason for this theoretical diversity is that behind each theory we find
diverging worldviews about human nature, the role of individuals in society,
and how societies and their members and governments interact with each
other.
For a long time, maybe even still today, neofunctionalism (represented by
Ernst B. Haas, for example) was the dominant theory. According to this, if
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) serve as organisations in which member states give
power to these organisations to overview the situation of human rights or economic
development in their countries.
4 European studies could also be interpreted as scientific integration: scholars create a
common language and platform to interact about European cooperation.