DOES “THE DEEP STATE” EXIST?

A recent post explored whether the US notion of the deep state makes any sense in the UK – and comes up with a broadly negative answer. It argues that -

• the UK ex-PM who took this line was herself the product of the very 

NGO system she attributed to the deep state

• the US is a federal system – the UK a parliamentary one. Very different!

• Brexit has required a larger civil service - to produce new regulations

• which contradicts the libertarian agenda of the New Right

• indicating the total ideological confusion of the Brexit crew

There haven’t so far been many books on the subject – just four that I’ve 

been  able to unearth - and all focussed on the US where, of course, 

President Eisenhower famously warned of the “industrial-military complex”

The American Deep State – Wall St, Big Oil and the attack on American Democracy 

by Peter Dale Scott 2015
The Deep State – the fall of the constitution and the rise of a shadow government 

by Mike Lofgren 2016
History of the Deep State by Jeremy Stone (2018) 
The Deep State – a history of secret agendas and shadow governments Ian Fitzgerald (2021)

Perhaps that reflects the dubious nature of the term – it smacks so much of 

conspiracy (which is indeed the focus of the third book)

Other countries, of course, have these “shadow governments” – particularly
 ex-communist ones. Romania is perhaps the prime example with its 
infamous Securitate still very much alive – one the best articles on this 
aspect of the country is Romania Redivivus 

The tentacles of the Deep Security State. Meanwhile, beneath the surface 
of democratization, the authoritarian tenor of Ceauşescu’s rule persists in 
Romania’s powerful security forces. The Securitate, the most ruthless police 
force in the Warsaw Pact, has been rebranded and is now run by a generation 
of operatives whose average age is 35, trained at special intelligence universities. 
They are, in many cases, the children of the 16,000 Securitate members who 
provided the backbone of the Romanian state after 1989, having emerged as 
the undisputed winners of the ‘revolution’ of that year. At least nine of these 
new services exist. The predominant one, the Serviciul Român de Informaţii (sri), 
monitors Romanians internally; with some 12,000 operatives, it has double the 
manpower of any equivalent agency in Europe and, with military-grade espionage 
equipment, conducts upwards of 40,000 wiretaps a year.10 The older generation 
of Securitate agents managed the privatization schemes of the 1990s;
they are now shielded by the younger cohort from legal oversight. 
This interlocking of economic influence—four out of the five richest
Romanians have a Securitate background—and legal inviolability—Romania’s
judiciary is too dependent on the sri to prosecute it—allows the deep state 
to operate with impunity.
The security services have vast stakes in telecommunications and
big-data collection. They oversee their own ngos, run their own tv
channels and have their people on the editorial boards of the major
Romanian newspapers and across the government ministries. The
permeation of the state by these networks comes to light only
occasionally. In October 2015, a nightclub fire in Bucharest killed
sixty-four, more than half the deaths due to infections contracted
later at a local hospital. Why? The hospital’s disinfectants,
concocted by a company called Hexi Pharma to which the government had
granted a monopoly"

The State is a strangely neglected subject to which only Bob Jessop has done 

recent justice – this is a recent slide presentation of the complexity which 

lies behind his theories.
Most of us are familiar with the classic definition of the State by Max Weber – 

“the monopoly use of violence” although Susan Strange rather punctured that 

definition with her States and Markets in 1988
Writing on the state goes back ,ore than a hundred years - Harold Laski’s 
The State in theory and practice was published in 1923