Exporting Hard Law Through Soft Norms: New Zealand’s Reception of European Standards

Analysis of regulatory export has largely focused on the formal international legal process and the mechanisms by which treaties have been translated into domestic law and policy. Such an approach reflects the traditional “formalist” approach of international law. This regards such elements as the sole components of the international legal system. This chapter challenges this traditional approach and its tendency to marginalize non-formal elements in the emerging global legal order.

The European Union has been one of the key exporters of its norms through such informal or “soft” mechanisms. Using the example of the EU’s impact upon the New Zealand legal system, this chapter examines how such soft law leads to hard consequences in the form of domestic changes to policy and law. As a result of this, it argues that the traditional formal distinctions between formal and informal obscure the real nature of international governance in the emerging world order.