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The turn to European society and its problems : connecting EU law and social theory
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1725-6739
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EUI; LAW; Working Paper; 2025/09
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AZOULAI, Loic, The turn to European society and its problems : connecting EU law and social theory, EUI, LAW, Working Paper, 2025/09 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92977
Abstract
European studies have traditionally relied on the power of broad concepts to account for the experience of European integration: be it integration, governance, market, or legal order. Many of these concepts, including "legal order", originated in social sciences. Yet, one concept is conspicuously absent from this list: "society" was seen as ill-suited for picturing European integration. This background makes the recent and pervasive return of the term "society" in the EU institutional discourse even more apparent. How to account for this shift? Should we take it seriously? Does it correspond to a shift in the legal form? In this paper, I shall attempt to propose a framework within which to think of the EU and its law in terms of European society makes sense. This is not just because “we need to subject the language of the times to its own critical pressure" (Orford citing McKenzie). It is also because the concept of society belongs to the domain of social theory, which can furnish a critical perspective on the world the discourse of European society promises to deliver.