Too soft to handle? A reflection on soft law in Europe and accession states

Abstract

The European Union adopted soft law as its most promising regulatory tool at the Lisbon Summit in March 2000. Analysis of soft law has been inconclusive to date, divided between those who value it in an increasingly culturally diverse Europe and those who caution that excessive use of soft law could weaken the legal tradition which has underpinned the EU to date. Most agree it is too soon to fully assess the effectiveness of soft law in implementing social policy. The article aims to address this methodological impasse by examining an example of soft law that has been in operation for fourteen years: the ‘Europeanisation’ of Associative States. Contradictory, but illuminative results are presented which, it is argued, highlight the internal contradictions inherent in the nature of current EU soft law. On the one hand the article focuses firstly on Hungary's national–level social dialogue where fourteen years of soft law are found to have been powerful enough to guide the ‘Europeanisation’ of social policy in an administration outside the EU's jurisdiction. On the other hand, the article reviews policy in training and poverty and social exclusion where it argues that ‘Europeanisation’ has been fragile. The article concludes that EU soft law is effective in those cases where it is slightly firmer in nature. It is argued that soft law needs to evolve into a harder legal mechanism. Despite the warm welcome which soft law received at Lisbon, the EU has begun to recognise this weakness and aims to engineer a more robust species of soft law.