Historians and social scientists have for some time engaged with the CJEU and its jurisprudence. Only the rise in populism and nationalism over the past decade, as exemplified by the Brexit vote and ongoing challenges to democracy and the rule of law, for example, in Hungary, has led analysts and proponents of the European Union to engage more comprehensively with some of the concerns of European citizens. In the context of a wider questioning of the popular legitimacy of the EU, lawyers, social scientists, and historians have begun interrogating progressive accounts of European integration and have shifted their attention to the lived experiences of European legal and market integration.
But what might be the specific benefits of a material and temporal approach to examining how citizens have engaged with European law? This talk addresses this question by first highlighting recent critical contributions to the study of EU law from an interdisciplinary perspective. Second, the presentation will draw on a new collaborative research project on citizens engaging with EU rules on food to argue that a material starting point to exploring the role of European law in society can enhance debates on the democratic understanding of Europe beyond EU institutions.