‘Building ‘peace by pieces’ is the basis of functionalism’. Elaborate. (2013, 15 Marks)
“Peace by pieces” captures the method of David Mitrany, whose A Working Peace System (1943) rejected both the League’s constitutional design and federalist schemes for world government. Peace is not declared whole in a treaty; it is assembled from fragments, each a small act of cooperation on a shared practical problem, binding shared interests together “where they are common, and to the extent to which they are common”.
What “peace by pieces” means
- Incrementalism. No single agreement carries the weight, so no single failure collapses the edifice. A settlement freezes power at one moment; a working system adapts because its authority rests on performance.
- The function determines the form. A river commission, a health body and an aviation authority need not share a membership or a boundary. A state asked to join a locust-control body is asked only about locusts.
- Low politics first. Health, transport, post, weather and standards come before territory and defence, because opposition there is weakest and gains are visible to all.
- Technical self-determination. Experts and agencies define the problem and its solution, keeping prestige politics out.
How the pieces add up to peace
- Trust from delivery. Cheaper freight or fewer epidemics create domestic constituencies that defend cooperation.
- Ramification. Each solved problem exposes the next, which Ernst B. Haas (The Uniting of Europe, 1958) formalised as spillover.
- Interdependence. Linkages thicken until severing them costs more than conquest could gain.
- Transfer of loyalty. Allegiance drifts to agencies that meet needs; sovereignty is hollowed out, not overthrown.
Confronting a political dispute head-on provokes resistance, whereas cooperation on an uncontroversial task builds confidence for the next. Joseph S. Nye titled his study of regional organisation Peace in Parts (1971) for this reason.
Illustrations
- Global: the UN specialised agencies (WHO, ICAO, ITU, Universal Postal Union) are Mitrany’s pieces institutionalised.
- Europe: coal and steel pooling (1951) grew into a customs union, a single market and a currency; Bulgaria became the euro’s twenty-first member on 1 January 2026.
- Asia: Amitav Acharya (2001) shows ASEAN laying its pieces through consultation and consensus, without supranational authority.
- India: the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) survived three wars, while the International Solar Alliance (2015) and the disaster-resilience coalition (2019) are India’s own functional pieces.
Limits of piecemeal peace
The pieces need a political floor. Where the core dispute is existential, it contaminates every technical arrangement: India placed the Indus treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam attack of April 2025. Stanley Hoffmann (1966) showed that integration stalls at high politics, and Brexit shows publics rejecting accumulated gains. Pieces also fail on distributive questions: the WHO Pandemic Agreement (May 2025) awaits its benefit-sharing annex, whose talks were extended in May 2026, and the US exit from the WHO in January 2026 shows a piece can be withdrawn at will.
Conclusion
“Peace by pieces” is indeed functionalism’s foundation, and its record vindicates the method where states are already at peace. Without political will to protect them, however, the pieces can be dismantled faster than they were assembled.