Law and the periphery

The Euro crisis brought to the fore a larger and hitherto invisible structural problem as to the relationship between the European Union's centre and its periphery. I am arguing that the concerns of the peripheral EU countries, of their workers and companies are difficult to argue in the existing ideology and that this contributes to the reproduction of the existing hierarchies in the EU. The ideology of the EU legal profession is one of the centre of the EU, and this importantly determines how harm is understood in EU law and which doctrines are present in legal thinking. For example, there is a presence of social dumping, but an absence of goods dumping in the EU legal vernacular. I argue that the centre‐periphery relationship is structured by legal entitlements, that the overtly political discourse of left and right is analytically insufficient and explain the phenomenon of conceptualism of contemporary legal thought.