The term “Deep State” has achieved new popularity in recent weeks, but not in reference to opaque military elites in faraway countries. Today, the term is aimed at the U.S. government itself. In particular, the deep state has become a catchall term, which credits a shadow network of spies and bureaucrats with conspiring to undermine the new administration.
Even Senior White House officials appear to believe in the concept. Answering a question about the deep state in a briefing this month – an answer he repeated yesterday – White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer sidestepped the term, but said there was “no question” there might be “people that burrowed into government during eight years of the last administration” who are seeking to push former President Barack Obama’s agenda.
Leaving the merits of such beliefs aside, it is easy to find examples of what a deep state might look like. In countries like Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt, alleged networks of powerful military elites and institutions have a long history of controlling or undermining the government. To tackle the question of whether a deep state exists in American government, it is first necessary to ask what form it has taken in these countries, how it operates, and what signs it leaves behind.
The modern term “deep state” was probably first used in the 1990s to describe a hidden military apparatus widely believed to exert behind-the-scenes control in Turkey. The country has had a civilian government chosen by free elections since 1950, but military – and political – elites have long been perceived to exert undue influence. If elected civilian leaders stray too far from the establishment path, the military is even willing to overthrow the government through military coups. In fact, Turkey has seen at least one coup, or coup attempt, per decade since 1960.
Still, says Steven Cook, Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, “it is not entirely clear that the deep state actually exists.” By its very nature, this kind of shadow government is designed to evade detection, so divining its intentions or very existence eventually becomes the work of conspiracy theorists. However, belief in the Turkish deep state is so widespread that its true nature hardly matters. Regardless of their accuracy, says Cook, the pervasive acceptance of deep state conspiracies “has the potential to rob people of their agency, feed political alienation, and radicalize the political arena.”
Turkish politics today provide some evidence of this dynamic. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party have largely broken the independent power of the military by outmaneuvering coup plots in 2003, 2004, and 2007, and finally defeating a violent military coup attempt in July 2016. Yet Turkish political actors continue to draw on the idea of the deep state – and the proof of the 2016 coup attempt – to fuel public belief in sinister conspiracies seeking to undermine their political objectives. For Erdogan, the susceptibility of the Turkish public to such arguments has likely helped provide political support for the post-coup purge of over 100,000 government officials, academics, and journalists from their positions. Most of those purged happen to be political opponents of Erdogan.
Some of these characteristics are replicated in Pakistan, where the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) are widely understood to wield controlling influence over the civilian arms of government. According to Daniel Markey, Director of the Global Policy Program at the School for Advanced International Studies, “this entrenched, unelected and opaque “deep state” is complemented by a near-permanent “establishment” comprised of a relatively small cadre of politicians, senior bureaucrats, and well-connected business families.”
Nevertheless, the military and the ISI hold a clear advantage in this power dynamic. The influence of Pakistan’s deep state clearly leads to a situation, say Markey, in which “the vast majority of Pakistanis are effectively disenfranchised.” Rule of law, human rights, transparency, and local governance all suffer in a system where dissent is harshly punished, and there is little legal or political accountability for the actions of the deep state. If a family member happens to be “disappeared” by the ISI or police, for instance, there is no legitimate path for recourse.
At the same time, the deep state can hamstring the functions of government in both domestic and foreign policy. Not only are the decision-making processes unaccountable and opaque to the outside world, their structure and authority is not even clear within the different institutions of the state. Thus, observes Markey, it has been fairly “normal practice for civilian officials – both at the bottom and top of the bureaucracy – to have no idea about what was actually happening on their watch.”
In both Turkey and Pakistan, the deleterious effect of extensive intervention in civilian governance by military and intelligence communities is clear. Secret, unaccountable, and illiberal, such actions curtail the rights and freedoms of a nation’s citizens and undermine the efficient functioning of its government. However, says Cook, “it remains unclear whether this is a function of the deep state or rather of perverse institutions and the political culture, which has made the kind of interventions attributed to the deep state seem, if not normal, then certainly unexceptional.”
If the deep state is not an entity in and of itself, but rather a product of illiberal and opaque societies, then transparent democratic societies like the United States can sleep a little easier. Entrenched bureaucratic interests may exist in America, but the intentional subversion of an elected civilian governance is in no danger of appearing normal.
Fritz Lodge is an international producer at The Cipher Brief. Follow him on Twitter @FritzLodge.
