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 statethe US is a federal system – the UK a parliamentary one. Very different!Brexit has required a larger civil service - to produce new regulationswhich contradicts the libertarian agenda of the New Rightindicating 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” – particularlyex-communist ones. Romania is perhaps the prime example with itsinfamous Securitate still very much alive – one the best articles on thisaspect of the country is Romania RedivivusThe tentacles of the Deep Security State. Meanwhile, beneath the surfaceof democratization, the authoritarian tenor of Ceauşescu’s rule persists inRomania’s powerful security forces. The Securitate, the most ruthless policeforce in the Warsaw Pact, has been rebranded and is now run by a generationof operatives whose average age is 35, trained at special intelligence universities.They are, in many cases, the children of the 16,000 Securitate members whoprovided the backbone of the Romanian state after 1989, having emerged asthe undisputed winners of the ‘revolution’ of that year. At least nine of thesenew services exist. The predominant one, the Serviciul Român de Informaţii (sri),monitors Romanians internally; with some 12,000 operatives, it has double themanpower of any equivalent agency in Europe and, with military-grade espionageequipment, conducts upwards of 40,000 wiretaps a year.10 The older generationof 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 stateto 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
