Soft Law in the European Union—The Changing Nature of EU Law

Abstract This article is based on the assumption that there is a continuum running from non‐legal positions to legally binding and judicially controlled commitments with, in between these two opposite types of norms, commitments that can be described as soft law. It aims at defining soft law in international relations in order to provide a mapping of EU law on the basis of the soft law/hard law divide. It helps categorise EU competences and public policies, and sees how they fit with the distinction between two kinds of processes: legalisation (transformation of non‐legal norms into soft or hard law) and delegalisation (transformation of hard law norms into soft law and evolution from hard to soft law).