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Describing and explaining support for regional integration: An investigation of German business elite attitudes toward the European Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

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Abstract

Data collected from a survey of corporate managers in the Federal Republic of Germany are used, first, to describe the level and pattern of attachment of this critical elite as regards regional integration in Western Europe and, second, to assess two alternative hypotheses purporting to explain different integration support levels among members of this elite. While not entirely satisfactory, the concept we introduce, “external interest” (defined as an individual's perception of the “effect” and “valence” of regional integration on one's own well-being), is more highly correlated with integration attitude than is its rival, Inglehart's concept of “values,” with respect to both the German managerial data we collected and also the European Community (EC) survey data upon which Inglehart's original analysis was based. The investigation drew attention to operationalizations of the concept “regional integration”; what in fact is being measured and explained when alternative (often analyst-specific) approaches yield conflicting findings.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1975

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References

1 “Amalgamation” and “pluralism” as alternative forms of integration are frequently discussed in the work of Kail W. Deutsch; for example, see Deutsch, Karl W. et al. , Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar. Note that Deutsch uses the term “pluralism” in the context of integration to refer to situations in which multiple levels of authority exist and are maintained; as, for example, in federal systems.

2 Lindberg, Jleon N. and Scheingold, Stuart A., Europe's Would-Be Polity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 423Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., p. 39.

4 See also Lindberg's, Leon N. article, “Political Integration as a Multidimensional Phenomenon Requiring Multivaiiate Measurement,” International Organization 24 (Autumn 1970), particularly pp. 691–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Deutsch, Karl W. et al. , France, Germany and the Western Alliance: A Study of Elite Attitudes on European Integration and World Politics (New York: Charles Scribnei's Sons, 1967)Google Scholar.

6 The citations for the foregoing references are: Puchala, Donald J., “International Transactions and Regional Integration,” in particular pp. 741–7Google Scholar; Schmitter, Phillippe C., “A Revised Theory of Regional Integration,” in particular, pp. 851–5Google Scholar; and Nye, J.S., “Comparing Common Markets: A Revised Neo-Functionalist Model,” in particular pp. 799812Google Scholar. All these articles are found in International Organization 24 (Autumn 1970).

7 Feld, Werner J., Transnational Business Collaboration Among Common Market Countries: Its Implication for Political Integration (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar.

8 Pruitt, Dean G., “Reward Structure and its Effect on Cooperation,” Peace Research Society Papers 5 (1966), p. 73Google Scholar. Deutsch, M. and Krauss, R.M., Theories in Social Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1965)Google Scholar. Homans, G.C., Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Har-court, Brace and World, 1961)Google Scholar. See also Thibaut, J.W. and Kelly, H.H., The Social Psychology of Groups (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1959)Google Scholar.

9 Simon, Herbert, Models of Man (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957), p. 257Google Scholar.

10 Lee, Wayne, Decision Theory and Human Behavior (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971), pp. 710Google Scholar.

11 Missing data were excluded in the merging of the “effect” and “valence” variables forming “external interest.”

12 Inglehart, Ronald, “An End to European Integration?American Political Science Review 61 (03 1967): 91105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity,” Comparative Politics 3 (10 1970): 4570CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Public Opinion and Regional Integration,” International Organization 24 (Autumn 1970): 764–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review 65 (12 1971): 9911017CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Changing Value Priorities and European Integration,” Journal of Common Market Studies 10 (09 1971): 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Inglehart, , “The Silent Revolution in Europe,” pp. 991–3Google Scholar.

14 Inglehart, , “Changing Value Priorities and European Integration,” p. 5Google Scholar. Among our sample of German managers employed in independent German corporations (n = 2766), 15 percent chose exclusively the “expressive or post-bourgeois” value priorities, 37 percent chose exclusively the “acquisitive” alternatives, and the remaining 49 percent had mixed responses, choosing one “aquisitive” alternative and one “non-acquisitive” one. The answers of 41 of the 2766 respondents were “not ascertained” and thereby treated as missing data.

15 Inglehart, , “Changing Value Priorities and European Integration,” pp. 27–8Google Scholar.

16 Inglehart, , “Public Opinion and Regional Integration,” p. 785Google Scholar.

17 “Meister” or “Gruppenleiter” denote the lowest level of management in the Federal Republic of Germany.

18 In several cases, corporate leadership objected to the sampling strategy on two grounds: first, that some members of lower management were not sufficiently informed to provide worthwhile answers; and second, that top management might be too busy to answer the questionnaire. No reservations were raised with respect to the great majority of managers in lower-middle and upper-middle management. For these two reasons, there is a slight under-representation of lower management on the one hand and top management on the other.

19 Here we followed Grotkopp, Wilhelm and Schmacke, Ernst, Die Grossen 500 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971)Google Scholar. This book and our study exclude from consideration all financial service companies.

20 The word “estimated” is to be taken seriously here because for different reasons different corporations employ different criteria in reporting total sales, sales to customers, and percentage of foreign sales. Our four-point scale purposely is crude, therefore reflecting rather gross dissimilarities.

21 Commerzbank, , Wer gehort zu wem? (Frankfurt: Commerzbank, 1971)Google Scholar.

22 See either Lindberg, Leon N., “Political Integration as a Multi-dimensional Phenomenon Requiring Multivariate Measurement,” pp. 662–8Google Scholar, or Lindberg and Scheingold, pp. 68–75, for a description and discussion of the functional typology employed here. The eleven functions identified in table 2 are most of those mentioned by Lindberg and were chosen to be representative of the four functional categories he employs; that is, economic, external, political-constitutional and socio-cultural. These function-describing variables are considered and used by him as indicators revealing the status of integration efforts.

23 The principal investigators of the 1970 European Community Information Service Study were Ronald Inglehart and Jacques-René Rabiei. This survey was referred to earlier in the discussion of Inglehart's assessment of the explanatory power of “values.” Raw data and a code book from this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

24 For a discussion of the concept of “representativeness” of organizations or societal subgroups, see Mennis, Bernard, American Foreign Policy Officials (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1971), chapters 1, 35Google Scholar.

25 See for example, on the one hand, Deutsch et. al., France, Germany and the Western Alliance, especially Part III; and on the other, Lindberg and Scheingold, and the work of Inglehart.

26 Characteristic of this approach is the following quote from the conclusions of a recently published article: “International integration should be treated as a unidimensional phenomenon. ‘Subdimensions’ are closely associated and form part of a single cumulative unilinear pattern. Therefore the most appropriate index for international integration would be based upon a Guttman scale.” Bernstein, Robert A., “International Integration: Multidimensional or Unidimensional?,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 16 (09 1972): 408CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Nye, J.S., Peace in Parts (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971)Google Scholar, chapters 2 and 3, and Lindberg and Scheingold, chapter 2.

28 For example, see Nye, chapter 3, especially p. 87, and Lindberg and Scheingold, chapter 3, especially p, 71.

29 Only these two factors, referred to in the text as “socio-political” and “economic,” had eigenvalues exceeding one.

30 The Integration Index used by Inglehart in his work based on the Cross-Nation Survey is a simple aggregation of responses to questions B and C in table 3, and the following item: “Would you accept it if there were over the German government, a European government responsible for a common policy in the areas of foreign affairs, defense and economy?” As indicated earlier, the first two questions were included in our survey. Responses to these questions were merged with a summated score assigned to respondents on the basis of their answers to the “functional scope” items described above in order to form the Integration Index. Note that this last item assumes a unidimensional integration function concept, an assumption which we have already shown to be misleading. Consequently, the construction of such an Index is questionable and we have used it primarily for purposes of illustrative comparison.

31 Note that two statistics, r and gamma, are used in table 5. The reader should not directly compare the coefficients reported, since gamma will tend here to yield somewhat higher figures then r.

32 For example, see Deutsch, et al. , Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, and Friedrich, Carl J. (ed.) Dimensionen der europäischen Gemeinschaftsbildung (Köln: West-deutscher Verlag, 1968)Google Scholar and also his Europe: An Emergent Nation? (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)Google Scholar.

33 For an elaboration of this item, see our article, Multinational Corporations, Managers and the Development of Regional Identifications in Western Europe,” The Annals 403 (09 1972): 2233Google Scholar.

34 Mitrany, David, A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966)Google Scholar. Angell, Robert C., Peace on the March: Transnational Participation (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1969)Google Scholar.

35 The direct relationship between international work experience and (1), the economic and socio-political integration factors, is r =.021 and r =.019; and (2), the overall Integration Index, is gamma =-.005.

36 Bauer, Raymond A., Pool, Ithiel de Sola and Dexter, Lewis Anthony, American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972)Google Scholar. See also Pool, Ithiel de Sola, Keller, Suzanne and Bauer, Raymond, “Influence of Foreign Travel on Political Attitudes of American Business Men,” Public Opinion Quarterly 20 (Spring 1956): 161–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 “Do you think that the Common Market has had until now on your standard of living a very favorable effect, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable?” (sic).

38 A good place to begin might be the articles originally appearing in the special issue on Regional Integration: Theory and Research,” International Organization 24 (Autumn 1970)Google Scholar. Each of the contributions in Part 2 (except the last which is a review by Alker) exists virtually by itself, separated from all the others in many obvious ways with respect to terminology, methodology and so forth. In addition, see our forthcoming book, Emerging Forms of Transnational Community: Transnational Enterprises and Regional Integration (D.C. Heath, Lexington Books).