EU Regulations as a hybrid genre

This research aims to approach hybridity in EU regulations from the perspective of genre analysis. Given the established structure that characterises EU regulations, the aim of this research is to explain the reasons why EU regulations are written as they are and to demonstrate that, on the one hand, it is possible to identify fixed moves that fulfil precise communicative purposes in EU legal documents and, on the other hand, that these communicative purposes are typical of written operative, expository and persuasive legal documents. The study, based on the principles of genre analysis, speech act theory applied to legal discourse and thick description of legal texts, was carried out on a corpus of ninety EU regulations on subjects (customs union; competition rules; monetary policy; marine biological resources; common commercial policy) that fall under the exclusive competence of the European Union according to the principle of conferral, which governs the limits of EU competences. The findings shed light on a new approach to hybridity in EU secondary legislation. They start from the assumption that the legal order created by the European Union is hybrid - due to its origins in common law, civil law and international law - and lead to the conclusion that such a hybrid legal order is expressed through hybrid legal texts, namely EU regulations: they are influenced by the legal framework from which they originate and by the political and historical reasons that led the founding father of the former European Community to address the problem of the so-called 'democratic deficit' also from a textual point of view, and not only by means of economic and political strategies. They start from the assumption that the legal order created by the European Union is hybrid - due to its origins in common law, civil law and international law - and lead to the conclusion that such a hybrid legal order is expressed through hybrid legal texts, namely EU regulations: they are influenced by the legal framework from which they originate and by the political and historical reasons that led the founding father of the former European Community to address the problem of the so-called 'democratic deficit' also from a textual point of view, and not only by means of economic and political strategies.The results show that EU regulations, despite being operative legal documents, are highly persuasive texts that make use of rhetorical and linguistic devices such as semantic evaluation, hedging, intertextuality and modality in order to mitigate their illocutionary force and strengthen the power of the reasons given in the recitals to justify the provisions of the articles in the operative provisions.This textual peculiarity of EU regulation is even more significant when combined with another critical factor: the contractual nature of EU law.The parties involved in the 'negotiations' are on the one hand the Member States and the EU institutions, but on the other hand they are the Member States and their citizens, since once ratified, EU regulations do not require any further step or transposition to become part of the respective national legal frameworks.Thus, the persuasive and rhetorical power of EU regulations and their textual peculiarities, as described in this study, support the initial hypothesis according to which EU regulations are an instrument created to regulate social behaviour - as is the nature of laws - and to address the phenomenon of the 'democratic deficit' from a textual perspective.