Domestic and International Consequences of Regional Integration

The purpose of this article is to suggest that the perspective of scholars studying regional integration be broadened to include research expressly concerned with the consequences of integration and to indicate the directions that such efforts might take. To date, the students of integration have been mainly describing, analyzing, and measuring the integration process. This is true of research on the European Communities as well as of studies of integration elsewhere in Europe and on other continents. In our quest for political community we have utilized a number of different research strategies and focused on a broad range of indicators, but our primary concern has been with regional capacities for aggregating political authority.</jats:p