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

Mark Dawson

No 24, EUI-RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute (EUI), Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies (RSCAS)

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.

Keywords: European law; open coordination; social policy; soft law; rule of law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-05-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-reg
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