The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is usually seen as a sui generis policy, due to its intergovernmental nature. Challenging this view, we argue that CFSP is a policy like any other and therefore can be analysed by approaches used to study EU public policy more generally. We consider CFSP as a policy producing norms just as any other EU public policy does. Some of these norms enter the category of soft law, and are supposed to be complied with even if the European Court of Justice has no – or not much – competence in the field. Drawing on two strands of literature, the literature on soft law and the one on non-compliance with EU law, we focus on compliance with CFSP norms at the domestic level. Our aim is to develop a coherent approach, which allows us to explain why national administrations do – or do not – comply with CFSP soft law. Our model is based on four hypotheses pertaining to the presence or absence of (legal and non-legal) sanctions, the number of veto players, the financial stakes and the normative distance between the European rule and the norm hitherto defended by the national administrations. We apply this model to four Member States (Germany, Greece, Poland and the UK), using secondary literature to find examples of national resistance and suggest possible explanations for this resistance. Other examples will be given by the other articles in this special issue, which we refer to at the end of this introductory article.