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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.
