Power and Regionalism: Explaining Regional Cooperation in the Persian Gulf

Scholars of the first wave of postwar regional economic cooperation focused almost exclusively on neo-functionalist theories based on institutional spillover from one issue area to the next ( Haas, 1958 ; 1961 ; Haas and Schmitter, 1964 ; Nye, 1968 ; Schmitter, 1969 ; Lindberg and Scheingold, 1971 ). But with the widely acknowledged failure of neo-functionalist explanations, the second wave of regional cooperation has been studied from much more diverse theoretical vantage points ( Haas, 1976 ; Mansfield and Milner, 1999 ).