Preparing for disaster: the Seveso directive, infringements and societal mobilisation of European law, 1976–2000

EU legal scholarship’s recent ‘turn towards society’ demands new approaches to studying how EU law has been experienced and shaped both at present and in the past. Yet, there has been relatively little research on the engagement of societal actors with European law beyond a narrow focus on litigation. This article looks at a more indirect engagement with legal norms. Using the contested compliance with the EC’s 1982 Seveso directive on industrial safety as a case study, it uncovers the pivotal role that individuals and societal organisations played in procedures that have thus far been considered highly institutionalised: the infringement proceedings started by the European Commission. By tracing how the problem of preparing for disaster came to be regarded by societal actors in Italy and the Netherlands as both a legal and a European problem, it advances an approach showcasing that societal actors experienced EU law less as a separate category and more as part of a broader continuum of solutions to a societal problem.