ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss the range of EU policies. In order to do this, I set out the principal areas in which the EU has the power to act and explain why it has certain competences but not others. I also discuss the issue of what I call ‘policy style’: the approach to policymaking taken by the EU. This has links with the discussion of decision-making presented in Chapter 3. However, it is not the same subject. Policy-making procedures are structural, that is, they are established by rules of the Treaty, relating to and even helping to create the political system of the EU itself. Policy styles, on the other hand, are the ways in which EU actors use the procedures, or even go outside them, to make policy. This chiefly relates to whether traditional, or ‘hard’, policy is preferred to more recent forms of ‘soft policy’, which tend to emphasise guidance and standards to be achieved instead of imposing a detailed requirement to legislate. Finally, I outline the main policies of the EU.
