Once and awhile Counterpunch surprises me with a bit of unvarnished factual reporting.  I didn’t know that Functionalism was a think in International Relations – but what a great concept to make the world a more peaceable place.

“Peace through pieces” was an important contribution to understanding mediating differences by the political theorist David Mittrany in the mid-20th century. Mittrany argued for an issue-specific strategy for solving larger problems. “The historical task of our time is not to keep the nations peacefully apart but to bring them actively together,” Mittrany wrote, “through the continuous development of common activities and interests across them.” Closer interaction because of global interdependence, Mittrany postulated, would lead to closer cooperation and peaceful co-existence, a concept known in international relations as Functionalism.

Many of Mittrany’s proposals were used in the establishment of the specialized agencies of the United Nations. A recent example of his theory that peace would come from common rules and technical cooperation would be the admission of Russia to the World Trade Organization in 2011. By including Russia in a rules-based institution, it was assumed, larger cooperation, based on the institution’s rules, would follow, a sort of socialization of the Russian Federation, at least in trade.”