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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2026

Marc Steiert Open the ORCID record for Marc Steiert [Opens in a new window]
Marc Steiert*
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Legal History of the European Union, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory , Germany
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Email: steiert@lhlt.mpg.de
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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.

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Dialogue and debate: Symposium
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European Law Open , First View , pp. 1 - 9
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press

1. Introduction: Structures, risk, individuation and resilience

This is Europe: The Way We Live Now, a collection of life stories collated by British journalist Ben Judah, opens with an evocative call to witness how Europe’s 748 million inhabitants ‘live now’.Footnote 1 Through 23 testimonies of everyday life,Footnote 2 the book exposes both the diversity of lived experience across Europe and the structural constraints that shape and often limit it.

This article relies on 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.Footnote 3 First, starting from Judah’s narratives, I show that everyday life is embedded in social structures – networks of relations, institutions and expectations that enable or constrain agency, generate vulnerability to injustice and influence how injustice itself is perceived. Drawing on critical realist social theory, I argue that injustice emerges not only from isolated acts, but from this structural embeddedness (Section 2).Footnote 4

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, such as the individual, the state, the family, the employer, or collective organisations. For this purpose, I adopt a broad understanding of European law that encompasses law and its interaction with policy across the European continent (Section 3).

Third, since the late twentieth century, European law has increasingly shifted social risks and responsibility for them onto individuals, a process I call individuation.Footnote 5 While individuation may benefit those already well positioned within social structures, it leaves many others to navigate structural injustice alone. It also masks the role of public and collective institutions in mediating social structures and their injustices (Section 4).

Fourth, I propose a different way of seeing Europe’s law of the everyday: as a framework for resilience, centred on social risk allocation. Resilience here does not denote the preservation of existing arrangements or the development of a framework to better absorb shocks and adapt to injustice. Used in that sense, resilience can risk legitimising the endurance of injustice while shifting responsibility for coping onto those exposed to harm. This article rejects such understandings and refers instead to a transformative idea of resilience: 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.Footnote 6

On this account, the central question of legal ordering is not whether risk is allocated, but how. I argue that the degree to which risk is mutualised across society – its collective sharing – can be understood as a key criterion for assessing whether law supports a more just and habitable Europe. Mutualisation can, for example, enable agency within the constraints of social structures, and eventually interrupt reproduction of structural injustice. However, this sense of direction cannot function as a final measure of justice, since any allocation of risk helps constitute the very social structures through which future injustices emerge.Footnote 7 On this view, European law reasserts three key dimensions: its nature as both product and architect of social relations;Footnote 8 its capacity to recalibrate rights and responsibilities;Footnote 9 and the need for reflexivity, review, reiterationFootnote 10 and inclusiveness in seeking to prevent, contain and mitigate injustice via legal risk-sharing (Section 5).Footnote 11

2. Foregrounding structural injustice in European law

This is Europe powerfully illuminates how structural injustice permeates everyday life in Europe and its legal regulation. This becomes visible through characters such as Nazneen, a refugee worker in Greece who faces gendered and racialised discrimination and is then abandoned by her employer during wildfires,Footnote 12 or Nora, a Latvian teenager who finances her education abroad through sex chat work because of her family’s economic precarity.Footnote 13 Although Judah’s stories focus on individuals, they reveal how societal access to security, opportunity and dignity is mediated by broader social and legal arrangements. This section therefore argues that everyday life, law and their normativity are socially embedded. Two concepts are central here: social structures and structural injustice.Footnote 14

Critical realist social theory starts from the premise that people act within social structures – that is, within networks of social relations, institutions and expectations, which constrain or enable their personal agency and how people interpret the world around them.Footnote 15 Structures evolve through the cumulative, often unintended effects of agency, including regulatory change, as well as through the competing normativities embedded in them, among which is the socially structured understanding of law itself. Social structures do not predetermine life outcomes, but they do embed the range of available choices.Footnote 16 For instance, Nazneen’s refugee identity and economic marginalisation increase her vulnerability to discrimination and amplify her exposure to environmental disaster. Nora’s limited financial resources and geographical origins, combined with her wish to migrate within the EU, condition her engagement in sex chat work. In both cases, what may appear as individual lives are structured by broader social relations.

The same is true of more privileged trajectories. The story of Jean-Marc, from France’s prestigious winemaking terroir Meursault, illustrates this in This is Europe.Footnote 17 Born into a winemaking family, Jean-Marc defies family expectations to become an actor, only later reconciling acting and winemaking after his father’s premature death. While his trajectory involves agency,Footnote 18 it is shaped by access to social, cultural and economic capital, and by the regulatory frameworks that enable their use. It is this environment that makes his self-fulfilling life path possible.Footnote 19 Compared with Nazneen and Nora, Jean-Marc inhabits a structure of relative privilege rather than one of constraint. Put differently, social structures shape life chances and how people perceive what is possible, normal or just. Judah’s own narrative reflects this tension. Although his aim is to make unseen injustice visible, his stories often isolate individuals from the broader collectives and structures that shape their lives.Footnote 20 In this respect, the book mirrors a wider cultural tendency to read life-courses through the lens of personal choice and individual opportunity.Footnote 21

This raises the question of structural injustice, a type of injustice that arises not only from individual wrong, but from the operation of social structures. Following McKeown, three forms of structural injustice can be distinguished: pure, avoidable and deliberate.Footnote 22 Pure structural injustice arises from the unintended accumulation of social practices without a clearly identifiable responsible actor. The relevant actors are themselves heavily constrained by the structures they reproduce. As McKeown suggests, climate change is a plausible example insofar as it depends on a multiplicity of acts that cannot be pinned on a single (group of) actor(s) and the emergency therefore necessitates a systemic overhaul of capitalism.Footnote 23 Avoidable structural injustice exists where social actors can prevent or contain the injustice. Nora’s situation illustrates this. She receives a scholarship to study in Italy, but no support for the travel costs required to take it up. Yet the scholarship-granting institution had the capacity to grant this support. Deliberate structural injustice means social agents maintain unjust structures because doing so serves their interests. This is the case with Nazneen’s employer, who forces her to work in dangerous wildfire.

This is Europe thus reveals differing degrees of power to navigate, resist or reproduce structural injustice. Those degrees of power are themselves socially embedded. However, once injustice is seen as structural, it becomes possible to analyse how European law interacts with it: sometimes correcting injustice, often reproducing it or even obscuring it altogether. European law is therefore both a product and an architect of social relations. It is embedded in the social world it governs and in the competing forms of power and normativity that structure everyday life. But it also helps to reproduce that world. Making this visible is one of the central critical tasks of legal scholarship.

3. European law and social risk

European legal frameworks, together with other modes of societal organisation, help constitute social structures by allocating social risk.Footnote 24 While itself produced within these social structures, law distributes structural risks across a plurality of societal actors, institutions and networks.

This risk allocation becomes clearer when viewed in its interaction with the three forms of structural injustice. In the case of climate change as pure structural injustice, law cannot eliminate its systemic causes alone, but may shape how vulnerable different people are to its effects and how much capacity they and their organisations have to mitigate or respond to climate change. Law-makers therefore mediate exposure to structurally generated harm. European law also matters for avoidable structural injustice. EU free movement law is often celebrated as emancipatory.Footnote 25 In practice, however, it frequently conditions mobility on access to economic resources,Footnote 26 thereby entrenching class injustice. Nora’s ability to study abroad depends not only on her legal right to do so, but also on whether she can actually afford to move. European law, in turn, could widen access to study finance abroad,Footnote 27 or strengthen employment perspectives in disadvantaged regions through cohesion policy that mitigates the factors that compel people to migrate.Footnote 28 Law finally mediates deliberate structural injustice by shifting power to those who suffer from it. Nazneen’s life is shaped by both European migration and labour law. Labour law, for instance, imposes duties on employers to protect workers’ health and safety.Footnote 29 Nazneen’s employer deliberately disregards these obligations during wildfire.Footnote 30 If labour inspection and enforcement were effective and granted refugees equal protection, some of that injustice could be prevented, contained or mitigated through the existing legal arrangements.

Across these examples, a broader pattern becomes visible: European law allocates social risk across a multipolar field of actors, institutions and networks. Social risk is rarely shouldered by one actor alone; rather, it is distributed – often unequally – among individuals, public institutions,Footnote 31 families,Footnote 32 employersFootnote 33 or collective organisations.Footnote 34 Seen in this way, legal ordering can be understood as an ongoing process of multipolar ‘(de-)mutualisation’.Footnote 35 Sometimes law mutualises risk by spreading it across public or collective institutions. At other times, it demutualises risk by shifting it onto individuals. The post-war welfare state is an important example of risk mutualisation that helped break certain structural injustices – although certainly not all.Footnote 36 Labour, consumer and social security law has long rested on the recognition that social and economic life is marked by asymmetries of power and that risk is to be shared.Footnote 37 Social protection systems, for example, often require employers or public institutions to bear some of the risks associated with unemployment, illness or care. Similarly, apprenticeship schemes have historically distributed responsibility for the transition from training to work across the state, employers and trade unions rather than placing it on the individual alone.Footnote 38 Mutualisation therefore has the capacity to redistribute social risk. It can enable agency within the constraints of social structures, and eventually interrupt reproduction of structural injustice.

By contrast, many contemporary regulatory choices reflect demutualisation. They shift risk and responsibility away from collective institutions and onto individuals. Such choices are neither neutral nor technical. Whether deliberate or not, they are shaped by political projects, economic ideologies, and the social structures within which lawmakers themselves are embedded. Understanding Europe’s law of the everyday through this lens reveals that social risk sharing is a lever to prevent, contain, and mitigate injustice and support a more habitable society. How that lever is designed is always political, always contestable, and always open to recalibration.

4. This is Individuation of risk in Europe

This section argues that contemporary European legal frameworks increasingly shift responsibility for social inclusion onto individuals, a process I call individuation. Individuation is an intensified form of demutualisation, as it leaves individuals to bear social risks that were once or could be more collectively shared. This is Europe contains numerous examples that illustrate how dominantly individuation can favour those already advantaged by social structures, as in Judah’s accounts of Meursault or Linhares da Beira, while it deepens injustice for those structurally marginalised, as in Storkow or Baloga. For them, individuation perpetuates structural injustice and legitimises the retreat of law, public institutions and collective actors from efforts to advance social justice and sustainability.

Individuation can arise in at least two ways. First, it can be intentional as a normative programme of legal and policy design. Second, it can emerge more accidentally, as the partly unintended outcome of struggles between competing political projects. In its intentional form, individuation reflects neoliberal and Third Way policies that dominated from the 1970s to at least the turn of the millennium. These policies privileged personal responsibility over collective risk-sharing, such as through the conditionalisation of social protection.Footnote 39 The story of Aboud in Storkow exemplifies this. A Syrian refugee in Germany, Aboud is forced into informal work for a delivery subcontractor of Amazon because of the restrictive conditions attached to his wife’s social benefits.Footnote 40 To preserve access to those benefits, he undertakes precarious, unjust work, excluded from social security, labour law and occupational health and safety protection. In other cases, individuation may be less clearly designed and more accidental. A useful example is Mourlon-Druol’s historical analysis of the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).Footnote 41 While often and rightly associated with regressive social policy,Footnote 42 some of the EMU’s architects were aware that the absence of democratic oversight would eventually become problematic. They were not necessarily aligned with neoliberal ideology. Yet the EMU’s institutional practice contributed to deregulation and the erosion of social risk-sharing – in short, to neoliberal outcomes. This example underscores how complex social systems can intensify individuation, sometimes accidentally.

Individuation also operates at both the subjective and collective level. Subjectively, individuals experience risk differently depending on their structural position. Consider the contrast between the stories from Linhares da Beira and Baloga. In Linhares da Beira, EU free-movement law facilitates the mobility of remote workers – often highly educated and relatively affluent individuals – who repopulate a rural Portuguese town.Footnote 43 For these digital nomads, individuation appears as freedom and self-realisation. It is experienced as empowerment because it is underwritten by socio-economic capital and by a regulatory framework that works in the person’s favour. In Baloga, by contrast, Ionut, a Romanian truck driver, embodies a much more precarious form of EU-enabled mobility. His labour is essential to the functioning of the internal market, yet his life is marked by precarity, deteriorating health and migration compelled by economic necessity.Footnote 44 The legal frameworks seem to be similar: both Ionut and the remote workers make use of free movement rights. Yet the outcomes are radically different because their structural positions are radically different. Individuation does not affect everyone equally, and can reproduce and often intensify structural injustice.

Collectively, individuation reshapes how societies perceive injustice. Jean-Marc’s story from Meursault illustrates this further. There, climate change – a collective and systemic emergency – is reframed through the lenses of entrepreneurial adaptation and opportunity. European law facilitates the opportunities of French winemakers to relocate or expand into colder regions as temperatures rise.Footnote 45 Such moves are portrayed as individual and as innovative, while the framing obscures the fact that climate change is not simply a business opportunity for already relatively affluent French winemakers; it is a human-made ecological emergency that threatens the conditions of the planet’s habitability itself. Individuation changes not only who bears risk, but also how risk is interpreted.

In sum, individuation distorts the understanding of (in)justice by isolating individuals from the social structures that shape their opportunities and risks. It recasts structural harm as personal failure and is, to a significant extent, intentional. Individual responsibility has become mainstream not only in neoliberal, but also in social-democratic, policies. Recognising this helps reclaim law’s redistributive potential. At the same time, this reclaiming must remain attentive to the limits of the law: the unpredictability of social change, the structural bias built into legal institutions and the risk that legal risk-sharing itself may reproduce paternalism, domination and injustice. For these reasons, any move away from individuation should be accompanied by reflexivity and inclusive participation. Risk mutualisation will not eliminate injustice altogether. Yet it can help build legal and institutional arrangements that are better able to prevent, contain and mitigate injustice, and therefore better able to support a more just and more habitable Europe.

5. Conclusion: A way of seeing European law anew – the law of the everyday as resilience

Engaging with Ben Judah’s This is Europe highlights the importance of approaching European law as embedded in social structures rather than as an autonomous system operating apart from them.Footnote 46 Doing so helps identify how law contributes to the production and reproduction of structural injustice, while also illustrating where legal intervention may help prevent, contain, mitigate or contest it. At the same time, any regulatory intervention must remain attentive to its own limits. Social structures evolve in ways that can never be fully predicted, and legal imagination itself is shaped by the very structures it seeks to transform.

This article therefore offers a way of seeing European law anew: as a framework of resilience centred on the allocation of social risk.Footnote 47 Resilience, in this account, does not denote the preservation of existing arrangements or the development of a framework for adaptation to injustice. Rather, it expresses a transformative ambition: to organise society through forms of risk-sharing that shape the relationship between law and social structures in ways that prevent, contain and mitigate injustice, and support a more habitable society and planet.

From this perspective, the central question of legal ordering is not whether risk is allocated, but how. The degree to which risk is collectively shared is a key criterion for assessing whether legal arrangements can support a more just and habitable society. By reducing the tendency to individuate social risk, its mutualisation can expand agency more equally within existing structural constraints and help interrupt the reproduction of structural injustice. Yet risk mutualisation alone cannot ensure a society without structural injustice. Risk-sharing arrangements will inevitably themselves generate and reproduce such injustice, as illustrated by the persistence – or, more precisely, solidification – of sex discrimination and traditional family models within Europe’s post-war welfare states and the male breadwinner model on which they relied. Put differently, mutualisation can signal the direction in which an allocation of social risk that fights structural injustice may lie, while it must remain open to reassessment in light of the social structures it itself helps produce.

Seeing European law as a legal framework of resilience therefore requires reflexivity, review, reiteration and inclusiveness. Reflexivity is necessary because every risk allocation helps produce the social structures within which future allocations of social risk will be made. The capacity to recognise and reflect on the forces that sustain and transform such structures is thus essential to any society attempting to become more just and habitable. Review and reiteration promote a dynamic understanding of both risk allocation and the social structures within which it operates. Neither remains fixed, and both should therefore remain open to contestation and change through carefully deliberative democratic processes. Inclusive participation, finally, is essential because what remains unseen in the law and the social world it imagines is often precisely what would make society more resilient to injustice. Approached in this way, resilience does not prescribe a fixed distribution of risks, since social structures themselves remain dynamic and unpredictable. Rather, it provides a framework for continuously evaluating and revising the terms on which risks are shared. It offers a way of understanding law as a product of social relations and as a means of reshaping them through democratic and inclusive processes directed towards a more just and habitable society and planet.

My reading remains, of course, embedded in its own positionality. I offer only one way of seeing Europe’s law of the everyday anew: a way that I hope foregrounds social embeddedness and risk allocation, while illuminating why injustice persists and how law might contribute to the pursuit of a more habitable and just society in Europe and beyond.Footnote 48 To paraphrase Judah, seeing Europe’s law of the everyday as resilience means understanding why we live as ‘we live now’.Footnote 49 It means uncovering the social structures that embed everyday life, the injustices they produce and the ways in which law may entrench or transform them.

References

1 Ben Judah, This is Europe: The Way We Live Now (Picador 2023) Preface.

2 ‘Everyday life’ finds increasing interest in social science research. It often denotes a move from macro-level research to grounded realities: X Guillaume and J Huysmans, ‘The Concept of “the Everyday”: Ephemeral Politics and the Abundance of Life’ 54 (2019) Cooperation and Conflict 278; E Recchi, Everyday Europe: Social Transnationalism in an Unsettled Continent (Policy Press 2019). The concept is also taken up in (European Union) law, P Ewick and SS Silbey, The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press 1998); M Hertogh, Nobody’s Law: Legal Consciousness and Legal Alienation in Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan 2018); L Azoulai, ‘The Law of European Society’ 59 (2022) Common Market Law Review 203. However, the everyday research agenda still needs theorisation: A Sarat and TR Kearns (eds), Law in Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press 2010) 21–61.

3 The introduction to this symposium reflects on how to sketch out (Europe’s) law of the everyday and its normativity. It underlines that modern law, particularly European law, aims ’to depart from and reshape everyday habits and social patterns’. This form of legal normativity is considered to have led to ‘a form of disconnect from the specific conditions of people living in Europe’: L Azoulai and J Meakin, ’The Law of the Everyday: Europe’s Method: Introduction to the Symposium’, in this isue. A different attempt to understand European ‘legal relations in their broader social totality’ has been made in R Knox, E Nanopoulos and A Woodhouse, ‘Capitalism, Imperialism and European Union Law: Towards a Marxist Approach’ 4 (2025) European Law Open 290.

4 The concept of structural injustice traces back to Iris M Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford University Press 2011). Young describes structural injustice as ‘exist[ing] when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them … Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms’. See M McKeown, ‘Structural Injustice’ 16 (7) (2021) Philosophy Compass e12757. Structural injustice was characterised as injustice of ‘everyday life’, M McKeown, With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice (Bloomsbury 2024) 1. For structural injustice explained in the operation of social structures themselves, see S Haslanger, ‘Systemic and Structural Injustice: Is There a Difference?’ 98 (2023) Philosophy 1.

5 On my concept of individuation, see M Steiert, ‘The EU and the Regulation of Young People’s Work Transitions: Individuation, Governance and Quality’ (ETUI 2025) Working Paper 2025.02.

6 This essay’s concept of habitability is inspired by planetary habitability in astrobiology – that is, a planet’s potential to develop and sustain an environment hospitable to life. See S Seager, ‘Exoplanet Habitability’ 340 (2013) Science 577.

7 The notions of prevention, containment, mitigation and remediation are all relevant to studies of risk management. There, they often describe different stages of risk management, such as in the important debates on climate change. One may say that prevention stops an issue before it happens; containment seeks to isolate it and stop its spread; mitigation attempts to reduce its severity or impact; and remediation is concerned with correcting, counteracting and eventually (permanently) resolving it. This is, of course, only one possible take on their meaning, but it is the one used here. As this article considers injustice to be embedded in social structures – which, even if altered, remain unpredictable and I believe are likely to (re)produce injustice – I adopt a view in which a permanent remedy against structural injustice remains unlikely. This is why the article relies only on the notions of prevention, containment and mitigation. A likely utopia may not be a world without injustice, but rather one in which human beings accept that social inclusion involves risks and injustice, and therefore collectively strive to make their world more just.

8 On the establishment of the legal field, see P Bourdieu, ‘La Force Du Droit – Eléments Pour Une Sociologie Du Champ Juridique’ 64 (1986) Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 3.

9 Scott Veitch presents law similarly. By recognising law’s role in the proliferation of irresponsibility, he recognises its potential to distribute responsibility. See S Veitch, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering (Routledge-Cavendish 2007).

10 My argument is not that a perfect allocation avoiding injustice can be found. As social structures continuously modify, law should be regularly assessed and eventually adjust its working methods and outcomes. In the process, however, political choices will be made, which must be subject to scrutiny.

11 The article adopts a reformist vision of (European) law. Even where law is abolished, it assumes law will be replaced by other means of societal organisation.

12 Judah (n 1), at 421–39.

13 Ibid. 141–58.

14 V Mantouvalou and J Wolff (eds), Structural Injustice and the Law (UCL Press 2025); V Mantouvalou, Structural Injustice and Workers’ Rights (University Press 2023).

15 Haslanger (n 4); McKeown, With Power Comes Responsibility (n 4), at 33–5. On critical realist social theory, including social structures, MS Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press 1995), in particular Chapter 2. A different vision of social structures can be found in Giddens’ structuration theory: A Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Polity Press 1984).

16 On ‘determinist’ social theory that focuses only on the macro-level, see McKeown, With Power Comes Responsibility (n 4), at 20.

17 Judah (n 1), at 242–63.

18 I use Jean-Marc’s story as an ideal type. By contrast, Judah notes that this protagonist passed through two tough years in Paris working in precarious small jobs before starting his training as an actor. Ibid., 252.

19 P Bourdieu, La Distinction : Critique Sociale Du Jugement (Éditions de Minuit 1979).

20 Collective embeddedness could have been prominent in Judah’s account of the Belarussian protest movement (‘Homyel’), or the story of the Portuguese village Linhares de Beira. See Judah (n 1), at 159–80 and 344-73. That collective embeddedness can find its place in a similar book: J Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Allen Lane 2019). In this collection, I Muñoz Ibarra, ‘This is (white) Europe: Race and European Law of the Everyday’.

21 In my view, the life-course does – and should – include individual choices, yet these are embedded in social structures.

22 This relies on McKeown’s development of Young’s theory of structural injustice: McKeown, With Power Comes Responsibility (n 4) 41.

23 McKeown admits, though, that the actors of climate change are blameworthy for their actions and must bear different degrees of responsibility, Ibid., at 104.

24 Unlike in, for example, environmental regulation, where risk is a narrow, legally contested term, this article uses the notion more broadly as a way of seeing law.

25 As discussed in F De Witte, ‘Emancipation Through Law?’ in L Azoulai, S Barbou des Places and E Pataut (eds), Constructing the Person in EU Law: Rights, Roles, Identities (Hart 2016).

26 Infamously foregrounded in Case C-333/13 Dano, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2358; Case C-67/14, Alimanovic, ECLI:EU:C:2015:597.

27 Via the equal treatment guarantee applicable to EU citizens. Access to study finance abroad, for example, was comparatively ‘narrowed’ through European Parliament and Council, ‘Directive 2004/38/EC on the Right of Citizens of the Union and Their Family Members to Move and Reside Freely within the Territory of the Member States, OJ L 158, 30.4.2004, pp 77–123’; Case C-158/07, Förster, ECLI:EU:C:2008:630.

28 Arts 174-178 TFEU. On the possibility, M Steiert, ‘An Opportunity or a Threat to Cohesion? Brain Drain, Young People, and Geographical Mobility in the EU’ 2023 (2024) Revue des affaires européennes – Law and European Affairs 739.

29 For example, Council of the European Communities, ‘Council Directive 89/391/EEC of 12 June 1989 on the Introduction of Measures to Encourage Improvements in the Safety and Health of Workers at Work, OJ L 183, 29.6.1989, pp 1–8’.

30 Judah (n 1), at 429–33.

31 Political economy includes scholarship that categorises types of states in their relationship to economic regulation which includes risk sharing: see, for example, U Lepont and M Thiemann, ‘The European Investor State: Its Characteristics, Genesis, and Effects’ 28 (2024) Competition & Change 381.

32 Prominently, G Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Polity Press 1990).

33 An example is occupational health and safety regulation, which creates employer duties of care: see, for example, Council of the European Communities (n 29).

34 In some EU countries, such as Denmark, collective agreements create pension funds mutualising (parts of) pension risk: G Brunner, Risk-Based Supervision of Pension Funds: Emerging Practices and Challenges (World Bank 2008) 96.

35 On risk (de-)mutualisation, see M Freedland and N Countouris, ‘Conclusion: Mutualization and Demutualization in the Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations’ in M Freedland and N Kountouris (eds), The Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations (Oxford University Press 2011); N Countouris and M Freedland, ‘Introduction: The Myths and Realities of “Social Europe”’ in M Freedland and N Countouris (eds), Resocialising Europe in a Time of Crisis (Cambridge University Press 2013) 7.

36 The well-known example of an unjust social structure reproduced by welfare capitalism is the male breadwinner model – that is, conceiving of open-ended, full-time work as male and assigning women to the private sphere/household with their eventual work being understood as an additional source of family revenue only. Another example is the reliance of welfare capitalism on the persisting, racialised and imperial ties of colonial value extraction from the Global South. On the role of EU law in it, see D Ashiagbor, ‘Rethinking EU Social and Labour Law through Racial Capitalism’ in H Eklund (ed), Colonialism and the EU Legal Order (Cambridge University Press 2025).

37 Examples of underlying ideas of power inequality can be found in G Davidov and B Langille (eds), The Idea of Labour Law (Oxford University Press 2011); L Waddington, ‘Vulnerable and Confused: The Protection of “Vulnerable” Consumers under EU Law’ 38 (2013) European Law Review 757.

38 R Lutz, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl: eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte Westeuropas nach dem Boom (Erste Auflage, Suhrkamp 2021) 260–76.

39 Illustrated in A Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Polity Press 1998).

40 Judah (n 1), at 264–82.

41 E Mourlon-Druol, ‘Accidental Neoliberalism: Democratic Accountability in the Making of the Euro, 1957–92’ (2025) Contemporary European History 1.

42 F Costamagna, ‘National Social Spaces as Adjustment Variables in the EMU: A Critical Legal Appraisal’ 24 (2018) European Law Journal 163.

43 Judah (n 1), at 159–80.

44 Ionut lets the reader quickly know that his ‘whole generation’ migrated away from his home village. Ibid., at 19.

45 Ibid., at 242–4.

46 As, for example, in Mantouvalou and Wolff (n 14).

47 The concept of resilience has different – even conservative – meanings, such as a substance’s ability to return to its usual shape after modification. See Cambridge Dictionary, ‘Resilience’ (25 June 2025) <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/resilience> accessed 26 June 2025. Another strand focuses on the adaptive capacities of complex systems/communities to prevent, adapt to and protect from existing/emerging threats: L Bosher, ‘Built-in Resilience through Disaster Risk Reduction: Operational Issues’ 42 (2014) Building Research & Information 240.

48 Other readings of This is Europe and European law are offered throughout this symposium.

49 Judah (n 1) Preface.