American social sciences and Europeanization: theories of integration in the early 1950s

This thesis seeks to investigate the influence of American intellectual trends, namely structural functionalism, on the first fifteen years of Europeanization after the end of World War Two. In particular, it examines the role played by German intellectual refugees in the development of neofunctionalist theories of integration that accompanied American policymaking in this era by focusing on the work of Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas in the 1940s and 1950s. It analyses their account of the conditions in Europe that led to WWII and of the action required on the part of the USA to encourage western Europe back onto the path of successful modernization, defined with reference to the historical example of American federalism. It highlights the specifically technocratic conception of democracy that underpinned the neofunctionalist theories of European integration, and points to enduring imprint of this on contemporary European institutions.