Non-specialists tend to confuse the legal nature of this kind of regulations — be they acts of parliament or government regulations — and their content. For about a century there have been two dominating different concepts of the content of civil service regulation in continental Europe. The first is based on the monarchic tradition, according to which state employees need aseptic status due to the fact that they are the servants of the sovereign, to whom they owe a special fidelity and who in tum gives them a special protection; it is best illustrated by Germany. Thus civil servants are a specific category of state employees, empowered with very specific duties linked to the exercise of public authority. They are submitted to rules and employment conditions, which are very different from common labor law. ln Germany about 40 per cent of government employees (federal, regional and local) have this position of a civil servant (Beater) whereas the others are submitted to ‘ordinary’ law, that is, civil and labor law. This kind of system is also at the basis of civil service regulation in Austria, Denmark or Luxembourg.