In what ways does the functionalist approach in International relations help in maintaining peace and order in global politics?

Mitrany’s claim

• In A Working Peace System, David Mitrany held that form should follow function. Agencies should be designed around tasks such as health, posts, rivers, and trade.
• Loyalty would shift toward those agencies as they delivered welfare. War would become harder because societies were tied by working links.
• The approach was a reply to both power politics and to a single federal constitution imposed from above.

From functionalism to neofunctionalism

• Ernst Haas added spillover: cooperation in one sector creates pressure for cooperation in related sectors.
• The European Coal and Steel Community, the Treaty of Rome, and later the single market are the usual illustrations of that path toward the European Union.
• Robert Keohane’s later neoliberal institutionalism is a cousin, not a twin: institutions reduce transaction costs and cheating among self-interested States, without Mitrany’s hope that the State itself would fade.

Peace and order

• Functional ties can create zones of stable peace among members, as in Western Europe after 1950.
• United Nations specialised agencies, technical standards, and some peacekeeping support tasks follow a functional logic even when the Security Council remains realist.
• Order here is problem-solving order, which Robert Cox would call work within the given interstate system.

Limits

• High politics of security, identity, and survival do not spill over on a timetable. Charles de Gaulle, Brexit, and wars on the EU’s edge show the ceiling.
• Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer treat anarchy and relative power as first. Functional clubs do not remove the security dilemma among great powers.
• The Global South often experienced functional agencies as rules written in the core, which is Cox’s point about whose order is being stabilised.