Decency and Respect. New Perspectives on Emotional Bonds between State and Citizens

The 1850s were a watershed in the development of a modern state in Austria. With strong support of its military and Russian allies, the dynasty was able to emerge victorious from the revolution of 1848/49. The new, neoabsolutist regime was eager to build a strong, centralised state, extending its reach for the first time into even the smallest boroughs and villages of the monarchy.

Cf. Judson: Habsburg Empire, ch. 5; Georg Seiderer: Österreichs Neugestaltung. Verfassungspolitik und Verwaltungsreform unter Alexander Bach 1848-1859, Vienna 2015, ch. 4. A comprehensive overview of the current debates concerning the neo-absolutist period can be found in Harm-Hinrich Brandt (ed.): Der österreichische Neoabsolutismus als Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsproblem, Vienna 2014.

Emperor Francis Joseph I was keen to reorganise the state in a more centralised manner. After the parliament had been closed down, he reigned with the support of both an advisory body and his ministers, some of whom had a strong liberal past. The decree of 1851, reissued in 1854 as an imperial decree in a slightly extended version and passed by the ministerial conference without critical comments,

The ministerial conference had to be involved because the Reichsrat insisted on an imperial decree, and the conference therefore had to be heard. The ministry of the interior initially wanted to issue the norm as a ministerial decree, which was considered inadequate by Kübeck – a position for which he found support in the young Emperor: Communication of the president of the Reichsrat Karl Friedrich von Kübeck to the president of the ministerial conference Graf v. Bol-Schauenstein, MKK 1153/1854, 4. 4. 1854. On the discussion during the ministerial conference, cf. Waltraud Heindl: Die Protokolle des Österreichischen Ministerrates 1848–1867. III. Abteilung: Das Ministerium Buol-Schauenstein, vol. 3, Vienna 1984, pp. 200f.

Decency (Anstand) was expected from both sides in this asymmetric relationship between state officials and citizens. The German term Anstand transports a broad semantic field, and the specific meaning as used in the decree in question only emerged in the 18^th century to describe appearance and (linguistic) performance, i.e. proper outward conduct.

Jacob Grimm / Wilhelm Grimm: Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 1 (1854), Munich 1999, p. 474f.; cf. also Neuestes Conversations-Lexicon oder allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyclopädie für gebildete Stände, vol. 1, Vienna 1825, p. 316. By looking at contemporary semantics, I follow the advice in Rosenwein: »Problems and Methods«, p. 14f.

It is quite obvious that public officials in the Habsburg monarchy did not always perform their duties with the stipulated decency. Their most notorious deviations were flagrant exploitations of power to discriminate against people of a different nationality and/or political orientation, brutal responses to political protest in public spaces and a rather lackadaisical attitude concerning their official duties.

Cf. Peter Becker: »Stolpersteine auf dem Weg zum kooperativen Imperium. Bürokratische Praxis, gesellschaftliche Erwartungen und sozialpolitische Strategien«, in: Jana Osterkamp (ed.), Kooperatives Imperium. Politische Zusammenarbeit in der späten Habsburgermonarchie, Göttingen 2018, p. 23–53, at p. 40–42; Heindl: Josephinische Mandarine, p. 101–105, at p. 113–120.

The state and its apparatus could be insulted at any occasion where direct contact with citizens, in person or in writing, was established. For this reason, the law of 1851/54 specifically safeguarded mayors and tax collectors as functionaries who engaged with citizens on a regular basis. After the end of the neo-absolutist era, the return to parliamentary elections created another venue where state functionaries had to confront subjects in an emotionally laden situation: parliamentary elections. For example, let us consider the events in the Hungarian village of Kötegyán on 12 March 1869. When the commission appeared and some villagers found themselves not included in the electoral register, emotions ran high and the affected citizens defended their rights against an authority they accused of having consciously violated the law. At this point, the commission withdrew, and in the aftermath, two villagers – Alexander Borzás sr. and Alexander Borzás jr. – were taken into custody and tried for insulting and slandering the commission as a state authority (Behörde) in concurrence with incitement to violate the law. Father and son were sentenced to six and nine months in prison, respectively. They petitioned the Hungarian minister of justice for pardon, a request that he forwarded to the emperor with a positive recommendation. It was eventually granted.

Cf. Vortrag des ungarischen Justizministers Horvát vom 18. 6. 1870, KK 2429/1870. I would like to thank Mr. Leitner for bringing this case to my attention.

The two men had openly challenged the ruling of a public authority, not in writing but rather using the spoken word. Their case is nevertheless worth considering within the framework of my argument, as it reveals a pattern that will reappear until the end of the 20^th century. First, the case of the Borzáses supports Monique Scheer’s statement that »emotions are indeed something we do, not just have«.

Monique Scheer: »Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion«, in: History and Theory 51 (2012), pp. 193–220, at p. 194.

Public authorities were eager to disregard their own obligations concerning behaviour during interactions and their participation in shared emotional situations as established by the law of 1851/54. This was facilitated by a certain disregard by the law in the prosecution of slanderous speech acts. During the time of the monarchy, slanderous statements were treated as criminal acts.

The law of 1851/54 did not find much resonance with administrators. In its fifth edition from 1895, Ernst Mayrhofer’s handbook discussed the main ministerial decrees and supreme court decisions related to insults and defamatory speech acts in submissions to state offices. They were treated, however, as public defamation of the state to be prosecuted as a crime. What made these submissions a public statement? The state attorney used the nature of bureaucratic action for building his case: submissions to state authorities were read by more than one official and therefore considered public. Ernst Mayrhofer: Handbuch für den politischen Verwaltungsdienst, vol. 1, 5th ed., Vienna 1895, p. 360; cf. also the fine book by Philip Czech: Der Kaiser ist ein Lump und Spitzbube. Majestätsbeleidigung unter Kaiser Franz Joseph, Vienna 2010, p. 73–86. Czech analyses a series of cases from the Salzburg penal courts. Written and verbal attacks directed at the monarch or even at the state and its officials were considered major threats to the legitimacy of the political system and thus subjected to more harsh sentencing on the basis of the penal code: The legal norms relevant for these cases were the penal code of 1852, §§ 65, p. 278 and p. 312.

The legal fiction of shared emotional situations between public authorities and subjects was never translated into bureaucratic practice. When regulating emotions, public authorities focused on citizens as addressees of administrative acts. The law of 1851/54 still entertained a broad understanding of this regulation, as it required both positive emotions from the citizens and outlawed acts of doing emotions that would disturb administrative procedure.

On the regulation of emotion in administrative procedures, cf. the introduction to this volume, section 3

The law of 1925 formed the starting point for systematic application of the legal provision against beleidigende Schreibweise, i.e. slanderous writing. It was included in section six of the law on administrative procedure, where fines for violating order and for frivolous abuse of administrative procedures (Ordnungs- und Mutwillensstrafen) were stipulated. These fines were instruments for the regulation of emotions, aiming at the suppression of negative emotions in the oral or written interaction between citizens and public authorities. Banning emotional and/or irrational speech acts appeared to be necessary to ensure proper working of the state apparatus.

Cf. the remarks in the administrative court’s ruling on the rationale for these fines on 30. 5. 1994: VwGH 92/10/0469, 30. 5. 1994 (RIS document id: JWR_1992100469_19940530X01); cf. also VwGH 89/14/044, 30. 11. 1993 (RIS document id: JWR_1989140144_19931130X01). In contrast to the laws of 1851 and 1854, the legislators foresaw specific regulations for legal representatives: they could not be fined, but their contravening performance had to be reported to their disciplinary authority: AVG § 34, paras. 3 and 4.

The more frequent use of this norm by public authorities provided an opportunity for the administrative court to establish a more precise difference between what could be said and what was considered defamatory, and to clarify the rationale for punishing slanderous writing in its rulings. The main challenge for the court was to define the thin line between permissible criticism against officials, their performance and public administration in general on the one hand and defamatory remarks on the other hand. Citizens who were fined for insulting the public service often challenged such rulings by pointing out that they had presented their criticism of the public service with the best intentions and under the protective shield of the freedom of speech.

When citizens displayed a lack of respect for public administration in their submissions, their argumentation mirrored the intellectual critique of the relatively capacious intervention of the state in economy and society in the postwar years. Emotional responses by citizens to emotionalising speech acts of the authorities were – unlike under monarchical rule – permitted in public discourse but not in submissions to the authorities.

William Reddy: »Against Constructionism. The Historical Ethnography of Emotions«, in: Current Anthropology 38 (1997), pp. 327–351 emphasises the specific linguistic character of emotional expressions, as they have the »unique capacity to alter what they ›refer‹ to or what they ›represent‹«. (p. 327) This is, however, not the focus of my reflections on defamatory speech acts in submissions to the authorities. I am concerned with emotionalised reasoning in submissions to the authorities where, for reasons of a modernist bureaucratic culture, emotions are permitted only as a kind of linguistic contraband.

What statements did the administrative court consider defamatory? A 1991 ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice collected relevant speech acts, which can be loosely grouped into three categories:

When judges had to decide on incriminated statements, they were forced to draw a line between the sayable and the defamatory and between rightful criticism and dangerous emotional contagion. They used two strategies for this purpose. First, they focussed on the speech act itself: As long as they assessed its ›intersubjectivity‹, i.e. the facticity of the statements, they operated within the boundaries of their legal competence. If they considered a statement to have raised points that could not be subjected to a rational and empirically based assessment, they qualified the submission as beleidigende Schreibweise if they considered the non-rational argumentation to have been phrased in improper terms. When reading through the rulings and reflections of the administrative court, it is obvious that the judges believed in their competence to establish a clear division between emotional expressions, rational engagement with the social and physical world and (ultimately) their legal assessment. This assumption has been unmasked as modernist wishful thinking by sociological and psychological research.

Cf. Aschmann: »Emotionen«, pp. 17f.; Hilde Haider: »Emotionen als Steuerungselemente menschlichen Handelns«, in: Aschmann (ed.): Gefühl und Kalkül, pp. 34–47, at p. 37; Daniela Saxer: »Mit Gefühl handeln. Ansätze der Emotionsgeschichte«, in: Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte 14 (2007), pp. 15–29, at p. 16f.; Scheer: »Are Emotions a Kind of Practice«, p. 197 on the ›embodied‹, ›grounded‹ and ›distributed‹ forms of cognition.

The judges of the administrative court did not look at debates on libel cases. The reason for this negligence may be found in the different linguistic strategies used to assess defamation. In penal law cases, potentially defamatory statements were judged on the basis of their perlocutionary character, i.e. their effect on the person being addressed. In the field of public law, when defamation concerned the public service or one of its members, the assessment could rely on neither the perlocutionary nor the illocutionary act, i.e. the intention of the speaker or writer. Stressing the perlocutionary act would have meant a return to the monarchical regime of honour, which was slowly giving way to a democratisation of state and public administration – as called for by the social democrats in the First Republic and more thoroughly implemented under the Kreisky government in the Second Republic.

Cf. Richard Novak: »Demokratisches Prinzip und Verfassungswandel«, in: Hedwig Kopetz / Joseph Marko / Klaus Poier (eds.): Soziokultureller Wandel im Verfassungsstaat: Phänomene politischer Transformation, Vienna 2004, pp. 117–130; on the ›impeded‹ reform under the Klaus government, cf. Oliver Rathkolb: Die paradoxe Republik. Österreich 1945 bis 2005, Vienna 2005, pp. 182–184.

Judges at the administrative court navigated murky linguistic waters. One of their strategies was built on the assumed ability to differentiate objectively between defamatory and neutral semantics of words. Defamation as act of communication was thus abstracted from the writer, which came at the price of reducing speech acts to their propositional character.

John L. Austin: How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Oxford 1962; John R. Searle: Speech Acts. An Essay in Language Philosophy, Cambridge 1969, pp. 136–146.

Browsing the rulings of the administrative court, the reference to an objective meaning of incriminated terms is used both against and in favour of the appeal. In the case of the young woman, the administrative court supported her claim. Her suggestion that the appeals court in Tyrol may have not considered her detailed recollection of the events in question as a result of a misogynist attitude or a lack of experience in dealing with people of average intelligence was regarded to possess no defamatory character as it displayed none of the abovementioned characteristics.

VwGH 97/17/0187, 27. 10. 1997 (RIS document id: JWR_1997170187_19971027X01).

In its rulings, the administrative court referred to the understanding of an »ordinary reader« and thus followed a line of reasoning well established in the American legal tradition.

Roger W. Shuy: The Language of Defamation Cases, New York 2010, ch. 2.

In this case, this strategy was used to search for a general defamatory tone in a submission. The submission in question was a personal letter sent by an attorney to the Federal Chancellor of the Ständestaat that requested a secret investigation, as the sender saw no other way »to confront the unlawful actions of the security director of Styria«.

Bundesgerichtshof 1063, p. 320.

The second strategy of the administrative court examined the negative effects of a specific speech act on administrative procedures. This brought the emotional side of the communication between citizens and public servants into the fore in both its perlocutionary and illocutionary aspects. Public administration built its self-image on the bureaucratic logic of its procedures, meaning rule-based assessment of facts and decision-making, and public servants figured as highly disciplined office holders whose subjectivity was not to affect these procedures. The successful performance of the public service, conceived in this ideal–typical notion by Max Weber,

Cf. Hans-Ulrich Derlien / Doris Böhme / Markus Heindl: Bürokratietheorie. Einführung in eine Theorie der Verwaltung, Wiesbaden 2011, ch. 1 and 5; Stefan Breuer: »Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie«, in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17 (1988), pp. 315–327.

A ruling from 1995 makes this point explicit. It states that an additional criterion for beleidigende Schreibweise was that it compromised the climate for negotiations (Verhandlungsklima) between citizen and office:

In resolving the appeal by a Viennese citizen who had insulted the Vienna magistrate with the wording vertrottelte Magistrate, i.e. half-witted magistrates, the administrative court dismissed his claim that his phrasing had simply aired his displeasure, instead deeming it to »poison the atmosphere of the administrative procedure«.

VwGH 94/17/0427, 28. 9. 1995 (RIS document id: JWR_1994170427_19950928X01).

This reasoning expresses the fear of a dangerous emotional contagion resulting from shared emotional situations between subjects and officials. It considers emotional outbursts and emotionalising submissions to pose a problem for bureaucrats, since it places them at risk of responding emotionally themselves to the citizen’s defamatory speech act. The subjectivity and emotionality of public servants was systematically excluded from the basic conceptualisation of administrative procedures.

The relevance of emotional work within a service-oriented public administration is not yet reflected in the reasoning of the administrative court. On this aspect, cf. Saxer: »Mit Gefühl handeln«, pp. 21f.

The Viennese citizen who had used the phrase »halfwitted magistrates« defended his speech act with the right to free expression as guaranteed by the Human Rights Convention (HRC), which was ratified in Austria in 1958 and upgraded to the level of constitutional principle (Verfassungsrang) in 1964. Indeed, Article 10 of the HRC guarantees every person »the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions«, as the HRC states.

HRC Art. 10, para. 1.

Decisions on constitutional principles fell into the competence of the supreme court. It was the alternative and less often selected path for appeals against fines for defamatory writing. The sticking point of an appeal to the supreme court was the right to free expression. Its judges took a noticeably critical stance on the ruling of the administrative court by arguing that they were not always in line with the HRC.

VfGH B101/91, 12. 3. 1992 (RIS document id: JFT_10079688_91B00101_00).

Frustrations about speech acts by state authorities were translated into an emotional assessment of the political order during the First Republic and more frequently during the Second Republic. When citizens engaged in doing emotion in their complaints, they more or less skilfully used references to contemporary public debates about the state and public administration. Their written complaints can be read as an emotional practice that aired their own displeasure and aimed to solicit negative emotional reactions from the members of the public service.

On the concept of emotional practice, cf. Scheer: »Are Emotions a Kind of Practice«, pp. 209–212.

Let me present an example from Tyrol to illustrate the challenge to republican rule in the late 1920s. In 1929, a property owner protested the increase in local taxes with a statement in which he callously challenged the existing political system and threatened its representatives with imminent constitutional and political change. His call for an authoritarian turn was coupled with a warning of the coming persecution of representatives of the existing regime – a speech act that expressed, from his viewpoint, a widely held popular discontent with the existing political order:

While the democratic underpinning of the state and its institutions was the target of this submission near the end of the First Republic and on the eve of the Austrofascist regime, discontent with the political system in the Second Republic blamed the state and public administration for its non-democratic performance. Defamatory speech acts after the Second World War were situated within a broad intellectual critique ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno to the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who identified the concentration of power in the bureaucratic structures of state and industry as a highly problematic feature of the New Industrial State.

John Kenneth Galbraith: The New Industrial State. Boston 1985, pp. 406f.

The expansion of the state along with the increasing complexity of the administration and its impact on the daily life of its subjects resulted in a »sense of impotence«, as Kreisky would remark with remorse in a later government policy statement.

Government declaration of 19. 6. 1979, in Fischer et al., Kreisky, Reden, vol. 1, pp. 795f.

Since the 1960s, citizens increasingly blamed the public service for not conforming to the standards of a democratic state. Their speech acts were provocative, as the writers were very much aware of the negatively charged political past, and reached from mere suggestions (for example, by addressing a submission to the district police commissioner for Donaustadt, Dr. Adolf Hitlerplatz

VwGH 96/10/0033, 11. 5. 1998 (RIS document id: JWT_1996100033_19980511X00).

The authorities reacted to these provocations very sensitively and were frequently supported by the administrative court. When a Tyrolean was punished for violating mushroom preservation laws, he made a comparison to National Socialism in his appeal: »These fines are reminiscent of the NS-Regime«.

VwGH 92/10/0469, 30. 5. 1994 (RIS document id: JWR_1992100469_19940530X01).

Public officials would have been emotionalised by this belittling of the state and thus lost their ability to act rationally.

The referential space for comparisons to nondemocratic systems was not limited to historical examples. The rivalry between political systems during the Cold War, a central topic in the media, made knowledge about the abuse of citizens’ rights by the states on the other side of the Iron Curtain widely accessible. When airing their discontent with the Austrian state, citizens chose neither the state socialism of the German Democratic Republic nor the ›goulash communism‹ of Hungary as points of comparison but rather Ceaușescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania. The authorities’ response was invariably the same: administrative penalties for defamatory writing. The attitudes of the administrative court or the supreme court on these comparisons diverged, however, depending on the political and institutional contexts.

It was with these words that a Tyrolean farmer established an analogy between the practice of Kommassierungen, i.e. land merger proceedings, at the communal level and the widely known disregard of socialist states for private property. In his appeal against the fine for defamatory writing, he justified his phrasing with the broad public criticism of the Kommassierung procedure, which was even condemned by the European Court of Human Rights. The provincial government of Tyrol and its agricultural authority had acted in an undemocratic manner, as he claimed, because they enforced a legally based programme against the will and without involvement of those affected. From the point of view of the administrative court, however, the agricultural authorities had operated within the boundaries of the law. Based on the assumption that the lack of communication between the agricultural agency in charge of the merger program and the farmers did not contradict the program’s correct application, the judges considered his assertions unacceptable as they posed »in a democratic constitutional state an absolute insult to the authority«.

VwGH 91/07/0084.

Assessing the defamatory character of a statement requires an act of interpretation or in the words of one administrative court judge: »Judging writing to be defamatory constitutes the solution of a legal question«.

VwGH 96/10/0033, 11. 5. 1998 (RIS document id: JWR_1996100033_19980511X01).

In an appeal filed against the decision of a municipality in a building law case (Baurechtsangelegenheit), a lawyer made the following statement: »In political systems conforming to the model of Ceaușescu, appeal authorities have to act according to their mandate as a mere confirmation machinery«.

VfGH B13/92, 24. 6. 1992 (RIS document id: JFR_10079376_92B00013_01).

Public officials could be emotionalised most easily by the classic criticisms voiced against bureaucracy: dishonest attitudes, incompetent performance and lack of work ethics – if we disregard the few psychotic and scatological expressions. The (predominantly male) writers used the same ›crude‹ and ›expressive‹ language to communicate with authorities that was and still is widely used in public comments on public service.

Cf. Eva Kreisky: Bürokratie und Politik. Beiträge zur Verwaltungskultur in Österreich, Vienna 1986, p. 282.

The authorities reacted particularly touchily to phrases that ascribed an »abject disposition« to officials. A car driver who had been punished for drunk driving, for example, asserted that »police officials who were, of course, on duty to supervise the ›so-called parties‹ get drunk there. Then they mount their patrol car and make ›official‹ observations«. The administrative court considered this statement to imply an »abject disposition« of police executives and that it was therefore unacceptable. The concept of disposition enabled the administrative court to establish a connection between the administrative culture and the performance of individual civil servants. The organisation of work flows and the work ethic in the public service were explicitly addressed by some citizens. They used widely held stereotypes to be found in contemporary debates such as »the notion of the ›sluggard‹ in the public service«.

Kreisky: Bürokratie und Politik, p. 578.

This grammatically incorrect submission is the outcry of a graduate from a university of applied science who had applied for permission to use the title of Diplom-Ingenieur (degreed engineer). The decision on his application was delayed for procedural reasons; there were documents missing, at least from the authorities’ point of view. From the graduate’s perspective, the problem lay in the malfunctioning of the state apparatus. Unlike in the ›real‹ world, where money was paid for good performance, he claimed that officials received high salaries for inactivity and laziness. When they became active, it was to the detriment of the citizens, who were tortured and harassed. The writer identified the reason for this destructive behaviour in an envy complex by the officials directed against the talented and successful.

These reflections addressed the requirements for civil servants and was thus a topic that has accompanied critical discussions on public administration since the beginning of the 19^th century. Freiherr vom Stein identified the social and economic distance between citizens and civil servants as a central problem: He complained that officials were merely »interest-less without property« and therefore not sufficiently integrated into a liberal society considered to be composed of propertied men.

Heinrich Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom Stein: Briefe an den Freiherrn von Gagern 1813–1831, Stuttgart 1833, p. 91. Referring to this critique, Karl Heinzen characterised bureaucracy not just as »dull«, but as »mind-defunct« (geisttod): Karl Heinzen: Die Preußische Bürokratie. Darmstadt Lese 1845, p. 113; cf. also Bernd Wunder: Geschichte der Bürokratie in Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 7.

Lack of competence of individual officials is a recurrent topic in the submissions containing defamatory statements. The accusation could be made subtly, e.g. by pointing out that »the signature of the official who signed the decree is very similar to that of an illiterate«

VwGH 1188/80, 17. 9. 1980 (RIS document id: JWR_1980001188_19800917X01).

Recalling Erwin Ringel, the psychoanalytic commentator of Austrian contemporary history, this philosophical remark can be read differently. For Ringel, power is acceptable only if it »is coupled with a sense of responsibility in the best sense of the word«.

Erwin Ringel: Zur Gesundung der österreichischen Seele, Vienna 1987, p. 86.

The state aspires to generate positive emotions among its citizens, such as loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice property and blood for its persistence. The expansion of the state since the mid-19^th century increased the financial burden on citizens and provided them with a rapidly increasing range of public goods and services.

Cf. Peter Becker: »Der Staat – eine österreichische Geschichte?«, in: Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 126 (2018), pp. 317–340.

Since the 1850s, negative emotions could be punished as contraventions when aired in submissions to the authorities. During monarchical rule, emotional criticism of the state was immediately linked to the emperor, which constituted a much more severe crime and was subject to criminal prosecution. The democratisation of state–society relations increased the possibilities for critical comments on state and administration. Nevertheless, citizens who presented their critical comments in an emotionally loaded submission to the public service were still fined for a contravention, i.e. for defamatory writing.

The stipulation in the AVG (Allgemeines Verwaltungsgesetz) of 1925 placed a heavy burden on the shoulders of the judges at the administrative court: They were charged with clearly demarcating acceptable criticism from defamatory speech acts. This led them into murky linguistic waters, navigating between illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects of a speech act while trying to focus on its referential character so as to protect public officials from emotional contagion. Instead of introducing emotional work routines into public service, citizens were and still are required to keep their emotions under control and react to (from their perspective) provocative acts by the administration and its officials in strictly rational terms. However, rational critique could not be unambiguously differentiated from defamatory writing.

Encounters between the state and its citizens often take place in emotionally charged situations. Subjects meet policemen on the street as active road users; they meet public officials when they file applications for services of various kinds or when they have to engage with tax authorities.

Cf. Michael Lipsky: Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, New York 1983, ch. 1.

The administrative reform projects since the 1970s have aimed at thorough democratisation but equally at a redesign of office rooms where the public official interacts with subjects turned customers. Pleasantly designed offices, like the service offices of the district authorities and magistrates, are intended to promote a relaxed and objective discussion of requests, obscuring the power relations that still persist. Not all requests can be granted, however, and that fact in itself breeds discontent and a violated sense of justice, with all its possible repercussions in emotional and emotionalising submissions to the authorities. Even worse, the friendly surface of bureaucratic procedures does not extend to all jurisdictions. The authorities in charge of residence permits are less likely to be architecturally upgraded towards a service-oriented office space. Migrants, however, do not have sufficient means for access to the law and are positioned outside of any shared emotional situation with the civil servants in charge of their applications.