Soft Law and the Rule of Law in the European Union: Revision or Redundancy?

Abstract

The increasing use in the EU of soft law norms has created an extensive debate over the centrality of law as the principle instrument of European integration. Under a certain understanding of legality – one that sees the function of law as the provision of stable normative expectations - the development of methods like the OMC appears as an explicit threat. By another, the complex nature of the EU polity - and the functional tasks it must carry-out - places an impossibly high burden on any attempt by the EU to model its conception of legality this way. While this seemingly leaves the EU with a stark choice, the very features – the dispersion of normative authority between different national orders, and the need for rapid and iterative regulatory interventions – that have borne soft law also point towards the development of new conceptions of legality and its limits in a post-national setting. Soft law has both empirically challenged law’s place in the integration project, and demanded a re-evaluation of its contemporary meaning.