The Communications Theory and Individual Interaction

Ernest Haas discusses three different approaches to regional integration in, “The Study of Regional Integration: Reflections on the Jo and Anguish of Pretheorizing,” the Federalist approach, Communications approach, and the Neo-Functionalist approach. While I was reading the section on the Communications approach I could not help but think of how its premise parallels our everyday lives.

The basic premise of the Communications Theory is that if there are increased communications and interactions, especially between the elites of states, the result will be a close sense of “community” between them that will help regional integration. It makes sense, the more one state is tied to another and the more that they know about each other, the less likely it is that there will be distrust, backstabbing, and war and the more likely it is that there will be cooperation between them. Take a look at historical examples. The US did not have very open communications of merit with Japan or Germany before WWII or Iraq before the invasion of 2003 but those countries that we do have openness with, such as our neighbors Canada and Mexico, we have not gone to war with (except Mexico in the 1840s) and in fact have a level of regional integration with in the form of NAFTA. So the Communications Theory has merit in the world of International Relations, but how can it be applied to individuals?

I think that that the Communication Theory and be take a step further and applied to our everyday interactions, and at the same time give some merit to ‘IR as Everyday Practice.’ All one has to do is look at who your friends and enemies are. I guarantee that you have lots of communication and interaction with your friends and probably not a lot with your enemies. In relations to IR, it is easy for citizens of one state to hate citizens of another state on the other side of the world because they do know communicate or have interactions with one another. I believe that if citizens of states that are hostile to one another were given the opportunity to have extensive communications and interactions, they would not hate each other on such a massive scale. The same can be applied to racism. Racist people most likely do not spend a whole lot of time interacting with any members of the race of people that they hate. Elites make decisions about war and other hostile policies towards other states without ever having to actually look the people of that state in the eye and telling them. What if leaders had to meet face to face to declare war? Now that would be interesting. What I am trying to convey here is that if The Communications Theory can be applied successfully to the interactions amongst both individuals and states, then the idea that IR can be seen in everyday practice has some merit to it. A lofty but I think interesting off-shoot proposition of this idea for reaching a more peaceful state of world affairs would be to have face to face interaction between leaders of states during times of crisis. If decision-making individuals spent a lot of time together during a crisis, then a lot of causes of hostile actions such as cognitive dissonance, mistrust, and assumptions could be worked out. I do not know exactly how that would work but it is just an interesting place to start.