The Young Turk committee in 1909.
To the best of my memory, I first encountered the expression “deep state” some fifteen years ago, when the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, then living in the United States, was accused by his former ally, then-Turkish prime minister Recep Tayip Erdogan, of plotting against him. Gülen, a charismatic preacher, had built up an influential network of schools, mosques, and religious organizations, and of followers in the Turkish government and armed forces, all inculcating his doctrine of a socially progressive Islam under his leadership; Erdogan, who unsuccessfully sought his extradition, claimed he had conspired to use this network to overthrow the Turkish regime.
Today, in the era of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, “deep state” has become a buzzword. We all know that that it refers to an interlocking body of real or supposed bureaucrats, public officials, government employees, judges, military officers, academics, journalists, and intellectuals, all working surreptitiously together to thwart the will of a democratically elected government by preventing it from carrying out the mandate given it by the people. Beneath the visible surface of affairs, we are told, the octopus of the deep state spreads its tentacles everywhere and has everything in its unseen clutches. In the eyes of their loyal supporters, the Trumps and Netanyahus are dragon slayers doing battle with a sinister force that seeks to subvert the common man’s will.
It’s no accident that I first came across “deep state” in a Turkish context. Indeed, the term itself is a literal translation of Turkish derin devlet, which first was used by Turks, so it would seem, in reaction to the so-called “Susurluk scandal” of 1996; in this affair, a car collision near the town of that name led to the discovery of hidden ties between the minister of the interior, the Istanbul police, drug traffickers, and the leader of an ultra-nationalistic paramilitary group called the Grey Wolves. Derin devlet caught on quickly as a term for a system of covert links of this sort. By 2008 it had become, according to the German journalist Roland Magunia, “a household name, . . . referring to a state within the state.” Perhaps the earliest prominent appearance of it in English was in a 2012 article in the New Yorker. Written by the staff writer Dexter Filkins and titled “The Deep State,” it observed:
The deep state [in Turkey] is a presumed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered dissidents, Communists, reporters, Islamists, Christian missionaries, and members of minority groups—anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order, established in 1923 by Mustefa Kemal or Ataturk. The deep state . . . has functioned at a kind of shadow government, disseminating propaganda to whip up public fear or destabilizing civilian governments not to its liking.
Despite its qualifying adjective of “presumed,” Filkins’s description was of a reality that few Turks doubted. Ataturk was both a radical reformer and a thorough dictator; nor, without assuming dictatorial powers, could he have succeeded in his revolutionary project of secularizing Turkish public life and eliminating the place of Islam in it. Never popular with the Turkish masses, his anti-religious decrees incurred resentment and resistance, and there was, after his death in 1938, a gradual reaction against them that ultimately culminated in the rise of Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party. Centered in the army, the Kemalists fought the Islamist counterrevolution by whatever means they could while also combating such other perceived dangers as Kurdish separatism and militant leftwing labor and student movements. Three military coups in 1971, 1980, and 1997 brought down democratically elected governments that they distrusted.
Actually, the Turkish deep state, though not the term derin devlet, well predates post-Ataturk Turkey—a point made by Erdogan himself when, in a 2007 address, he called the deep state a legacy from the Ottoman empire. Though Turkish historians disagree with him, says the Ottoman historian Ryan Gingeras, he was essentially correct. The “Young Turk” movement that deposed the sultanate in the empire’s last years, writes Gingeras, was “from its origins a secret clique of dissidents within the Ottoman military [that] maintained strong ties with armed urban and provincial [criminal] gangs” and established, once in power, a semi-clandestine security apparatus called “the Special Organization” that leaned heavily on such ties. It was this organization, moreover, that provided “the central support system” for the so-called “National Forces” that, after the Turkish defeat in World War I, ultimately brought Ataturk to power. Only by “ignoring or deleting the historical links among the state, the Ottoman clandestine service, and rebellious criminals,” Gineras writes, have “Turkish scholars [been able to] avoid the existence of an Ottoman deep state.”
And here lies the difference between the Turkish deep state and the “deep state” of Trump or Netanyahu. As demagogic a politician as he is, Erdogan was dealing with something real. When, in 2016, now Turkey’s president, he put down one more attempted army coup, he successfully completed the task he had set for himself of dismantling and crushing this clandestine structure. It wasn’t a figment of his imagination.
The “deep state” of a Trump or Netanyahu, on the other hand, whether they actually believe in its existence or not, is pure fantasy. Yes, in both America and Israel there are bureaucracies that sometimes impede the implementation of government policies; there are courts that rule against government decisions; there are security organizations that occasionally disregard government directives; there are high army officers who disagree with government strategy; there are academic and intellectual establishments whose views are antithetical to those of government leaders. At times these institutions may act counter to the positions for which democratic majorities voted. None of this is imaginary. What is, however, is an alleged conspiracy of some or all these forces acting together against their government. For this, not a shred of evidence exists.
You might say equally, of course, that not a shred of evidence exists that it doesn’t. The deep state is a perfect locus for conspiracy advocates because, its alleged machinations being hidden from sight, there is no way of definitively refuting their existence. Go prove that a four-star general hasn’t been holding midnight phone conversations with the head of a narcotics ring, or that a Supreme Court justice isn’t taking orders from a cabal of law professors! Most Americans, like most Israelis, have enough common sense to know that such things aren’t happening. There are enough things for them to worry about that are.