Volume 1 (2016): Edizione 1 (September 2016)

Das Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte entstand als Netzwerkprojekt unter der Leitung des Autors in den späten 1980er Jahren mit dem Ziel, einen interdisziplinären, historisch orientierten Zugang zur wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit Staat und Verwaltung institutionell zu verankern. Wie das JEV, so ist auch schon meine frühere Beschäftigung mit der europäischen Verwaltungsgeschichte aus einem wissenschaftshistorischen Interesse und einem weiter greifenden, politischen und kulturellen Interesse an Frankreich erwachsen. Um diese Besonderheit verständlich zu machen, möchte ich auf die Entstehung und Entfaltung dieser Interessen etwas näher eingehen, zumal dabei auch Personen und Institutionen hervortreten, die zu dem wissenschaftlichen Netzwerk gehören, mit dessen Hilfe ich das JEV betreiben konnte (I.). Danach werde ich auf die eigentliche Gründungsphase des Jahrbuchs zurückkommen und anschließend den Blick auf seine Arbeitsweise richten (II.).

I have used Joseph Redlich’s witty characterization of the Habsburg monarchy as the »old empire of realized improbabilities« to explore the strained relations between state and society, between public officials and the State resp. the monarch during the First World War. Relying on a close reading of the debates at and decisions of the Austrian Supreme Court, I look at the improbable coexistence of the state of exception and the rule of law, of the codification of service regulations and the solipsistic engagement with them by public servants. I am particularly interested in the role of these ›realized improbabilities‹ for the delegitimization of monarchical rule.

The academic field of administrative law deals above all with the legal framework currently underlying today’s public administration. And yet its literature also touches on history, be it that of public administration or administrative law. This article takes a metahistorical approach, investigating the motives behind the field’s interest in history and the narrative traditions it follows. Finally, it seeks to answer the question of why scholars of law should play a part in writing administrative history.

State social policies and the related administrative practices have contributed substantially since the end of the 19th century to producing and normalising new forms of work in Europe. This has given rise to new rights and obligations and changed the relationship between a state and its citizens. The article looks at struggles on the opportunities and requirements for legally practising a trade in Austria in the period from 1918 to 1938, focusing on procedures for granting licences to trade. Besides the applicant and the Office of Trade, numerous other authorities (with different and often opposing interests), organisations and individuals could be directly or indirectly involved in these procedures. The article presents the findings of a systematic comparison of various attempts to obtain a licence to trade, highlighting the different situations and interactions in which arguments over the legitimacy of a given trade took place. The focus is on trades with little or no need for capital, premises, materials or formal qualifications, the licensing of which was nevertheless frequently dependent on a lengthy and laborious process of assessment. The methods by which applicants endeavoured to approach the authorities (or indeed avoid them) are outlined, along with how they made use of official categories, how they pursued their application with varying degrees of persistence and success, the information and arguments they put forward, and ultimately the role they played in shaping public administration (and thus also the opportunities and requirements for practising a trade).

The household forms an important category in social science research. It is used to collect data, to classify it and to represent the results. However, what seems to be a simple listing of facts becomes less clear when a basic question is raised: What is a household? Is it a family living under one roof? Is a roof limited to a house, or does a flat already constitute a household? Do members of a household have to be officially related, meaning married, adopted etc., or even related by blood? And how do households and definitions of households differ over time and space? Some definitions like the United Nations’s dwelling concept, for example, sound pragmatic with little regard to the social relationships of the actual human beings living in a household. However, there are indeed power relations within a household (e.g. between parents and children). Social scientists also observed these everyday asymmetries and therefore constructed a hierarchy in social classifications when they placed the household in a specific class according to the ›Head of Household‹ or the ›Household Reference Person‹, the ›Chief Wage Earner‹, the ›Householder‹ etc. The different designations of the reference person indicate that it is not an easy task to name this person or to define this person without a normative bias. By taking the example of Great Britain, this article demonstrates that the definition of the ›Head of Household‹ was a normative category rather than a descriptive one, meaning that it was less able to facilitate analysis of social reality and that it fortified a normative view with the help of statistics. While feminists and other historical actors in different states, for example the U.S., already criticised the normative bias of the definition in the 1960s and 1970s, a different question seems to be of equal or even greater importance to the historian: How, when and why did different nations and professions decide to drop the normative in favour of a descriptive definition of the ›Head of Household‹? This leads to a more general question: How did administrators, statisticians and other survey researchers deal with the aim of long-term stability of statistical categories for the sake of comparability, e.g. in a national census, on the one hand, and with adaption to societal change on the other hand? In taking the example of the United Kingdom, the following story combines aspects of a history of knowledge with administrative history.

This article explores how French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields, by encouraging a critical analysis of what the state does and produces, can bring a new perspective to studying the history of public administration. To do so, it explains how the theory can be used to perform historical analysis of public administration, and examine the case of the introduction of the merit system in the Canadian federal public administration to illustrate its perspective. The article concludes that the interplay among the theory’s core concepts – capital, field, and habitus – offers a reconceptualization of the study of administrative history that integrates historical, social, and political elements.

The central question on our article is: to what extent were the nature and content of merit principles for Dutch civil service systems influenced by the (changing) decentralized unitary state, during the periods of the Night Watch, Welfare and Enabling State between 1814 and 2016? In accordance with the decentralized unitary structure as originally devised by the 19th century Dutch statesman Johan Rudolf Thorbecke, personnel management and regulations were (and are) considered the prime responsibility of each (level of) government. Our article shows how neither in past nor present have there been hierarchical relationships in this area, with the exception of centralized wage settlements after the Second World War until the 1990s. In addition, we argue that civil service requirements have altered due to societal and public sector change. Those changes have become visible in a transition from a Night Watch to a Welfare State and more recently an Enabling State. This transition not only influenced what was expected of the role and position of civil servants at different levels of government in the decentralized unitary state. It also had an effect on what has over time been required of civil servants in terms of knowledge, capabilities, attitude, skills and experience. The article explains how the Thorbeckian decentralized unitary state provided a lasting but flexible format to accommodate these civil service system adjustments.

The article presents a new research agenda which links the composition of the British colonial administrations in the mid-20th century with the economic development of former colonies. It presents the first findings taken from the biographical records of over 14,000 senior colonial officers which served in 46 colonies between 1939 and 1966. Legal transplanting, i.e. the process of copying foreign law into countries lacking them, is discussed as a common practice in international development efforts and as new approach in understanding long-term economic development. The approach puts emphasis on the senior bureaucrats who are in charge of institutional copying. Successful transplanting requires very specific training and personal experience in the receiving society. Colonial officers with such characteristics served in the British colonial administrations while decolonization provides a historic period of intensified legal and institutional transplanting.

The advent of smallpox vaccine in France in 1800 inaugurates a new relationship between administration, public health and the definition of medical facts. As Napoleon himself refused to establish compulsory vaccination, a Comité de vaccine was established so as to impose the idea of a riskless vaccine protecting forever from smallpox. This article studies how human experimentation, clinical experience, medical imagery and statistics maintained the idea of a perfect vaccine for six decades, despite the multiplication of cases of post-vaccination smallpox and vaccine contaminations.

From the very beginning, Habsburgian literature was closely tied to the Empire’s »bureaucracy« – both to the administrative apparatus and to the class of officials who claimed this title as their own. The fact that numerous authors were recruited from this class may well have helped to create the »Habsburg myth«: the literary romanticisation of bureaucrats as loyal to the Emperor and as cultural pillars of a variegated empire that never accomplished to be a state in the modern sense. However, a real tie-up between the citizens and the bureaucracy, for which proof can be found still today and which is referred to as the »Habsburg effect«, is likely to have arisen due to the welfare state set up in the latter years of the Danube monarchy. Franz Kafka played a part in this. In addition to his articles and talks for the »Workmen’s Accident Insurance Bureau«, his literary texts also showed Kafka to be an analyst and reformer of both the old and new bureaucracy. Far from being mutually exclusive, his official duties and his writing constituted two aspects of one and the same enterprise: Kafka sought to free bureaucracy from the old Habsburg mythology; to repurpose it informally into an arbitrator in the class war and the conflict of nations; to give those it served a greater involvement in its workings; and to test the scope of a future bureaucracy that would be permanently reformed and ultimately indistinguishable from the social life. Kafka’s tales thus contain unique accounts of the Habsburg bureaucracy and of the myths and effects peculiar to it, for they keep the minutes of Habsburgian administration, while oscillating between the perspective of officialdom and that of an increasingly »colonised environment«.

Rüdiger von Krosigk’s re-reading (Relektüre) of Thomas Ellwein’s The State as Coincidence and Necessity (Der Staat als Zufall und als Notwendigkeit, 1993/1997) explores the concept of »living administration« in the Prussian region of East-Westfalia-Lippe in the 19th and 20th century. Ellwein’s approach seeks to overcome those top-down perspectives on public administration that mainly focus on formal hierarchical structures and nurture the idea of »rationality« in the activities, functions and development of public administration. By contrast, his history of public administration draws inspiration from empirical administrative sciences, organisation sociology and historical institutionalism. Even 20 years after publication it is still an invaluable source in the field of administrative history.