Infrastructural Europe: EU law and human life in times of the Covid-19 pandemic

We have been living extraordinary times. This pandemic is characterized by the magnitude of its impact: universal in scope, breakneck in its propagation speed, uniquely intrusive in our everyday lives and minds. Yet, on another level, we have been living ordinary times. Over the last decade, Europe’s “new normal” has been to face one crisis after another in a form of abnormality which has found expression in politics as decisionism (assisted by experts), in law as exceptionalism (in the form of states of emergency), and in mass and social media as polarisation (with a new kind of “infodemic”). At the European level, the manner in which current events have unfolded also sounds all too familiar. It is not so different from the sequence of events experienced during the crises of the last ten years: the first reactions by some