Ways of seeing European law anew: Structures, risk, individuation and resilience

Abstract This article relies on Ben Judah’s This is Europe for a conceptual intervention into how European law is seen, narrated and normatively assessed. It analyses European law as a mode of social risk allocation embedded in the normativity of everyday life through four connected lenses: social structures, risk, individuation and resilience. First, Judah’s testimonies reveal that everyday life in Europe is shaped by social structures that enable or constrain agency, generate vulnerability to injustice and influence how injustice itself is perceived. Second, European law – both through regulation and through its omission – is deeply implicated in these structures. It is a key mode of societal organisation as it allocates social risk across a plurality of actors, institutions and networks. Third, the article argues that, since the late twentieth century, European law has increasingly shifted social risks and responsibility for social inclusion onto individuals, a process I call individuation. Individuation leaves each person alone to navigate social structures while obscuring the responsibility of public and collective institutions for mediating them and their injustices. Fourth, the article proposes a different way of seeing Europe’s law of the everyday : as a framework for resilience , centred on risk allocation. Resilience here does not mean conservation or mere adaptation to injustice without structural change. Instead, it refers to a transformative idea: to reflect on the organisation of society via risk-sharing, with the aim being that social structures interact with law in order to prevent, contain and mitigate injustice and support a more habitable society and planet. On this account, the central question of legal ordering is not whether risk is allocated, but how.