Dual State: The Case of Sweden. Part II

Left: Olof Palme marching against the U.S. war in Vietnam (1968) together with the North Vietnamese Ambassador to Moskow. Right: Marcus Wallenberg, head of the Wallenberg Empire, who had John Foster Dulles as his lawyer during the Worl War II and facilitated for Swedish generals to meet with their U.S. counterparts and to meet senior U.S. officials. The Wallenbergs had their own intelligence service headed by Karl Arvid Norlin, who acted as liaison between U.S. officers and their Swedish counterparts (Photos, Public Domain).

The Swedish Dual State:

A Neutral State vs. a State under the U.S. Nuclear Umbrella

During the war, the Wallenberg family had sold ball-bearings and steel to Germany and had had secret deals with German companies (see above, p. XXX). Jacob Wallenberg had collaborated with the Germans (secretly supporting the Carl Gördeler and Stauffenberg coup attempt against Hitler in 1944), while Marcus Wallenberg worked with the Americans and with British intelligence. After World War II, the Wallenbergs continued as usual thanks to the support from their lawyer, later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and their representative in the United States, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Lovett. Sweden’s aristocratic and military elite abandoned its historical German ties for a pro-U.S. stand, whereas the Social-Democratic government officially kept the Swedish West-leaning policy of neutrality, which enjoyed popular support. After the war Marcus Wallenberg was the “liaison” for the Swedish Chief of Defence General Nils Svedlund and senior U.S. officers. General Svedlund met U.S. State Secretary John Foster Dulles at the home of Wallenberg. After the war, the Wallenberg brothers kept their liaison with the Dulles brothers (also with Allan Dulles as Director of the CIA). Similarly in the 1980s, Peter Wallenberg, Marcus’s son and successor as head of the Wallenberg empire, acted as a “liaison” between Sweden’s Chief of Defense General Lennart Ljung and the U.S. leadership (including Henry Kissinger and George H. W. Bush). A significant segment of the aristocratic military and industrial elite appeared as an informal network of power with its own loyalties and international ties distinct from the elected government with the ruling Social-Democratic political elite. Here we may find the historical roots of the Swedish dual state.

However, the economic success of Swedish industry, in particular of the Wallenbergs, was a precondition for the Social-Democratic welfare state, which became the foundation of the postwar compromise between Social-Democratic neutralism and pro-U.S. industrial and military elites. Prime Minister Hansson’s successor, the Social-Democratic Prime Minister Tage Erlander, supported the concealed Swedish–U.S. military ties as long as these were kept secret. The military leadership was informally given the right to act—and secretly cooperate with the United States and NATO—as long as the government had the right to speak, to define publicly what was official policy. This “historical compromise” of the 1950s and 1960s seems to have been acceptable to both sides. The Swedish power elites were as divided as before, but while the Social Democrats officially kept their West-leaning neutrality, some conservative and military elites exchanged their German ties for U.S. ones.

In Sweden, the prime minister had to bridge this conflict as a supreme leader, which gave him much the role of a “president.” In the early 1960s, Sweden’s top-secret nuclear weapons program, headed by the then Prime Minister Erlander, and by his secretary Olof Palme, was shut down (or rather cut down and put to sleep) possibly as a “deal” with the United States, making the United States extend its nuclear umbrella to Sweden. According to a U.S. National Security Council document from the 1960, the United States was to “assist Sweden … to resist Soviet Bloc attack” and this provided “the basis only for unilateral US planning and not for planning within NATO.” This was not to be known by NATO commanders. The State Department document, “Guidelines for Policy and Operations—Sweden” (June 1962) uses the same language, including U.S. unilateral planning for the same contingency; “This document was in force through the 1970s, and probably in one form or the other up to 1989.” General Carl Eric Almgren (Chief of Staff 1961–1967 and Chief of Army 1967–1976) told a government inquiry that, already from the 1960s, Swedish airbases were prepared to receive U.S. aircraft. Ingemar Engman (Advisor to Defense Minister Sven Andersson 1967–1972 and Assistant Undersecretary of Defense 1972–1979) stated that in case of a Soviet military attack on the continent, the prime minister, the defense minister and the chief of defense intended to give the green light for U.S. aircraft to be evacuated from West Germany to Sweden on the very first day of hostilities. To the Swedish leadership in the 1960s, this was a primary option. The U.S. aircraft in West Germany were under U.S. and not under NATO command, and in case of a war these aircraft could be re-deployed to Sweden as part of a bilateral Swedish–U.S. arrangement. From the early 1960s, a top-secret secure line was established between the Swedish Defense Staff and the U.S. Air Force Headquarters in Wiesbaden to facilitate this operation. U.S. attack and fighter aircraft would be re-deployed from West Germany and the USA to the “forward-deployed unsinkable aircraft carrier” of southern Sweden with direct access to the Central Front and the Soviet heartland rather than to the “defensively deployed unsinkable aircraft carrier” of Great Britain. With this option, the Soviet Union would suddenly be extremely vulnerable, and it would have to divert its forces and go for a more defensive strategy. This option was of vital importance to the United States. Sweden was not believed to be able to stay out of a war in the long run, and Engman argued that early deployment of U.S. air forces in Sweden would have been the only possibility for Sweden to receive American support. In 1970, in the middle of the Vietnam War, when Prime Minister Olof Palme (1969–1976 and 1982–1986) compared the U.S. bombing in Vietnam with the war crimes of Stalin and Hitler, he told his Chief of Defense General Stig Synnergren (1970–1978) that he was a great friend of the United States and that “the positive Swedish relations with the USA including the US nuclear umbrella and so on will be kept as before.”

This double-talk was appreciated neither by the U.S. president nor by a significant part of the Swedish security elite. President Nixon spoke in less diplomatic terms about Prime Minister Palme as “that Swedish asshole,” and the U.S.-leaning Swedish elite was becoming increasingly worried about government policy. During the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, this conflict developed into an exceedingly grave split between a U.S.-linked industrial-military-security elite on the one hand and a neutralist Social-Democratic government led by a strong prime minister, Palme, on the other. Sweden was a neutral and “sovereign nation state,” but Sweden was also a state “plugged in to NATO,” to quote John Owen at the North European Office of the U.S. State Department. This underlines the dual structure of the state: the contrast between nation-state aspect and the supranational U.S.-leaning aspect of the state.

While the Swedish government often carried out an anti-U.S. and anti-NATO policy in the developing world and in the UN, Sweden was, in certain respects, “plugged in to NATO” or included in the “US Grossraum,” to use Schmitt’s concept. The former chief of the Swedish Navy, Vice-Admiral Bengt Lundvall (1970–1978), has stated that his wartime position was to be Swedish liaison to NATO and, in the event of an occupied Sweden he would be Chief of Defense at the Swedish Headquarters in Exile in Great Britain. These positions, however, were so secret that “nothing was written down on paper.” The information was transferred “orally” to his successor Vice-Admiral Per Rudberg (Chief of Navy 1978–1984). Swedish–U.S. agreements were made “orally”, according to Lundvall’s opposite number and friend in Washington, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operation (1970–1974). Zumwalt was quoted by later Assistant Under-Secretary for Defense Dov Zakheim as saying that there was an “unofficial alliance” with Sweden. The option of sending U.S. aircraft to Sweden, as discussed above, was guaranteed by a Swedish–U.S. mutual understanding, apparently not by a formal agreement on a piece of paper. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey (1982–1985), told me in 1989 about the Swedish–U.S. military ties, declaring that “when it comes to Sweden, there was only one rule: Nothing on paper.” [footnote: I asked General Vessey at lunch afterwards about a paper of a colleague. Vessey pointed out that you would never find anything important in the archives, because “when it comes to Sweden, there was only one rule: Nothing on paper.” General Vessey has also served in the NATO Military Committee and as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. General Vessey confirmed this statement in September 1998. Also in September 1998, Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Mohr, former Norwegian Chief of Air Force (1964–1969) and Deputy Commander of NATO’s Northern Command (1969–1972), told me the same. Lieutenant-General Kjeld Hillingsø, former Commander of NATO’s BALTAP Command (1993–1995), told me that there was only one rule in the cooperation with the Swedes: “Nothing on paper.”] This was confirmed by several other high-ranking officers. General H. F. Zeiner-Gundersen, former Norwegian Chief of Defense (1972–1977) and Chairman of NATO Military Committee (1977–1980) said that his ties to his Swedish counterpart General Stig Synnergren were built on trust; continuity had to be guaranteed by close ties and absolute trust. General Synnergren told the Neutrality Policy Commission:

“I never asked the Government for advice. The responsibility was mine. I took the decisions. The Government – the Defence Minister or the Prime Minister – was not informed about all decisions. And in the single cases when I briefed them about something, I did that when there was a risk of a leak to the public.”

Several interviewed Western generals expressed an absolute trust in their Swedish military colleagues, but not in Sweden’s political representatives. At a lunch talk with James Schlesinger, former Director of the CIA (1973) and former U.S. Secretary of Defense (1973–1976), I asked him about his views on Sweden during his time in the government. His answer was short and concise: “Which Sweden? The ‘Political Sweden’? or the ‘Military Sweden’? The military were planning to get the USA involved as soon as possible.” [footnote: Discussion with James Schlesinger at the PRIO International Conference on Nuclear Technology and Politics at Rjukan, Norway, 16–18 June 1993. In my notebook I wrote that Mr. Schlesinger said: “Which Sweden? The ‘Political Sweden’ or the ‘Military Sweden’? The military wanted us to come as soon as possible.” I called Mr. Schlesinger on November 16, 1998, and asked him if I could quote him on that. He confirmed this statement but wanted to change the last sentence: “The military were [sic] planning to get the USA involved as soon as possible.”

Whereas political views in Sweden may, as in all countries, have represented a continuum of ideas from far left to extreme right, the political–military power structure was not only divided but, to a certain extent, polarized. Why? Because the more or less neutral Swedish nation-state—as expressed in popular tradition and official government policy—was in conflict with secret security hierarchies that informally were linked to the United States or “plugged in to NATO.” After looking into this secret collaboration, it may seem that this was the true Swedish security policy. Sweden’s official neutrality, however, would not necessarily be easy to change; it possessed its own inertia. The long tradition of neutrality had created its own justifications and its own discourse. And the prime minister and his close advisers would not necessarily accept U.S. military plans. If Sweden were to receive U.S. attack and fighter aircraft at Swedish airbases, Sweden would also be inviting Soviet nuclear attacks on these bases. According to Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh, Deputy Chief of Staff Leningrad Military District (chief of military plans North-western Military Theatre), Swedish airbases used by U.S. Air

Force operations would be eliminated. But this seems to have presupposed the use of nuclear weapons, certainly one reason for Prime Minister Palme’s preoccupation with a Nordic Nuclear-Weapons Free Zone in the early 1980s. Perhaps Palme started to believe in Swedish neutrality for an early phase of a war, which would save Sweden in case of a short war, while the U.S.-linked security elite still favored an immediate deployment of U.S. forces. It seems as if the “Political Sweden” existed with its own pride, its own vision and its own hierarchies, while other, and, partly overlapping or imbricating, hierarchies were directly linked to the United States, and to what Carl Schmitt called a Grossraum.

Sweden has, like most Western states, been both a sovereign nation-state and a state under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, a state belonging to the Pax Americana. The Neo-Realist idea of a unified state is not able to explain such a divided state or dual state. There seem to have been two conflicting “Swedens”: one national state structure, and one shadow structure, primarily linked to the United States, and this dual structure—which exists in every NATO state but is more pronounced in the case of Sweden—indicates that NATO is not merely something in between an alliance of sovereign states and a super-state, but is, in fact, a “both–and”: both a formal alliance and something of an informal U.S. “super-state”. Former National Security Agency Director William Odom argued that the United States was something of a “supranational political-military authority.”

Left: Commander Hans von Hofsten, who was the “head of the Naval officers’ revolt” in 1985-86, together with Rear Admiral (later Admiral) Bror Stefenson (Photo Public Domain), who, as Swedish Flag Officer Submarines and later Chief of Defense Staff, was the officer that his British counterparts informed about upcoming British submarine intrusions into Swedish waters. Stefenson was also the officer who several times gave cease-fire orders to let these submarines out. Many officers believed that these submarines were Soviet, and they believed that Prime Minister Olof Palme (Right: photo Presidency of Spain 1984)) had given these cease-fire orders, which led to a Naval officers’ revolt against Palme, where they even “discussed how it would be possible to manage this by removing Palme in one way or another”.

The Swedish Dual State and the Sovereign

In Sweden and probably also in other West European states, Morgenthau’s dual state, its divide between “regular state hierarchy” and “security hierarchy,” had been fused with the Grossraum divide between the hierarchy of the nation-state and the security hierarchy of the protecting power or Reich. U.S. intelligence and security forces would always be present in the local states to guarantee the security of the Grossraum. In other words, the U.S. security hierarchy would intervene if “necessary” as a veto force or an “emergency power,” or what Carl Schmitt called the sovereign. It might intervene to influence the nation-state hierarchy or with operations able to manipulate policies of this hierarchy or, in the final analysis, veto its decisions by replacing its leaders. This has certainly been typical for some Mediterranean countries but also for other European states, not least Sweden.

Sweden’s role in U.S. military strategy depended on trust, and the new Swedish “political line” would have been unacceptable to the Americans in a crisis or even more so in a pre-war situation. Mikael Bentler from the Swedish Security Service (SÄK) told me that in the beginning of 1970s, at the time of the military junta in Greece, the Swedish government supported its Social-Democratic colleagues in the Greek resistance movement. However, at the same time, SÄK bugged the same Greek resistance activists in Sweden and copied their documents, including their telephone books, for the Greek military junta. Or rather, the material was sent to Greece via West Germany, and it was used to arrest Greek Social Democrats when they arrived back home. Bentler held that information on political refugees from South Africa, Chile and Argentina had been passed on to the CIA by the SÄK and that the CIA then forwarded it to these regimes, making possible the arrest and torture of the relatives of the same political refugees. It

is a fact, in most civil wars or military coups from the 1960s to the 1980s—in Greece, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, in Vietnam and in Palestine/Israel—the Swedish government and its security services were supporting different sides in the conflict. The Swedish government collaborated with states or national movements at war with U.S.-financed forces, while individuals inside the Swedish security service and within the Swedish military forces collaborated closely with their U.S. or UK counterparts. Olof Frånstedt, Chief of Counter-Intelligence and Chief of Operations at SÄK (1967–1978), said in an interview that inside SÄK “we had a serious traitor, Mikael Bentler.” According to Frånstedt, Bentler had gone directly to Prime Minister Palme and informed him about SÄK’s activities. Frånstedt also said that he had been informed in the early 1970s by James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s Chief of Counter-Intelligence, and by Peter McKay of MI6, that Palme was believed to be an agent of influence. Palme, according to Angleton, had contact with a professor, a CIA double agent, who also was working for the KGB. Frånstedt said that he was briefed about it by “James Jesus at his office in Langley.”

In the early 1980s, Palme supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the ANC in South Africa, and when President Ronald Reagan tried to isolate the Soviet Union, he worked for a dialogue that included important Western and Soviet representatives. He chaired the Independent Committee for Disarmament and Security, which launched a program for “Common Security” strongly in conflict with U.S. policy. The Committee also proposed a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone in Europe which would include the Nordic countries and the two Germanys. From the 1980s, Palme’s neutrality policy may have led Sweden to try to stay out of an early phase of a NATO–Soviet war, which would seriously have weakened NATO’s Northern Flank. At the very outset of a war, Palme could have tried to block U.S. access to Swedish airbases, from which U.S. aircraft would be able to gain air superiority on the Central Front, be able to strike Soviet air defense systems in the Soviet Baltic Republics and provide U.S. long-range bombers with air support. Palme might have been able to block U.S. operations from Swedish territory, including U.S. air strikes against Leningrad and Moscow, and the use of Sweden for landing of the U.S. Marines in the Soviet Baltic Republics, which might have set free a considerable quantity of Soviet forces for use on the Central Front. In November 1983, Peter Wallenberg handed over a British intelligence report to the Swedish Chief of Defense General Lennart Ljung, which indicated that there might be “a Swedish-Soviet pact in the near future” (something Ljung considered totally unfounded). In November 1984, Ljung wrote in his diary that SACEUR, General Bernard Rogers, had told the Volvo Director P. G. Gyllenhammar that he was worried about Sweden’s “political line.” Henry Kissinger had told Gyllenhammar the same. Sweden was, according to Kissinger, “denied essential information.” The problem was the “Political Sweden,” not the “Military Sweden.”

It is not clear what Kissinger and Rogers refer to, but it is quite likely that they speak about the “Swedish submarine war” in the 1980s. A report from the U.S. Rand Corporation wrote that with 17 to 36 submarine operations (with regular subs, mini-subs, and combat swimmers) per year, “Soviet intruders began to penetrate into the heart of Sweden’s coastal Defense zones, including the harbours and naval bases” (italics in the original).⁸¹ Milton Leitenberg wrote for the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and

International Studies (1987) that these operations were “the first Soviet military-political initiatives against a Western European state since the Berlin crisis of 1960–1961.”⁸² In three years, the number of Swedes that perceived the Soviet Union as a direct threat increased from 8 percent to 42 percent and the number that perceived the Soviet Union as a threat or unfriendly toward Sweden increased from 33 percent to 83 percent.⁸³ Prime Minister Palme and his Cabinet could not understand why the Soviets did this, but false “evidence” presented by his admirals forced him to protest strongly against Moscow. The intrusions forced Palme to terminate his foreign policy, his policy for “common security” and his dialogue with Moscow. Local naval commanders received ceasefire orders from the Chief of Defense Staff immediately before passages of submarines they believed originated from the Soviet Union. They blamed Prime Minister Palme. They were furious. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov asked why the Swedish admirals did not use more force; they should sink every submarine that enters Swedish waters so that the Swedes could find out for themselves who was responsible for the intrusions. In 2000, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1981–1987) and British Minister of Navy Keith Speed (1979–1981) stated on Swedish TV that they had operated submarines both “regularly” and “frequently” in Swedish waters after U.S.–Swedish/UK–Swedish Navy-to-Navy consultations. Speed also said: “It was a Navy-to-Navy issue. The Chief of Defense Staff or the Flag Officer Submarines told his Swedish counterpart, and it was up to them to inform their government.” But they never did. In 2007, at a conference in Norway, I gave Weinberger’s Secretary of Navy, John Lehman (1981–1987), a printout of the Weinberger interview. Lehman told me that these operations in Sweden were decided by a “Deception Operation Committee” chaired by Director of the CIA William Casey (1981–1987), which was also mentioned in an interview conducted by the German TV-channel Arte.

In autumn 1985, a number of furious naval officers staged a “revolt”; they went public with their criticism of Prime Minister Palme’s handling of the submarine issue. One of these officers, Commander Hans von Hofsten, had participated in a meeting with police officers, according to his superior Commodore Cay Holmberg. They had “discussed the problem [of whether] one could trust Palme or not, and how it would be possible to manage this by removing Palme in one way or another.” Defense Minister Thage G. Peterson said that “military circles directed a well-organized attack against Olof Palme” in the months before his trip to Moscow in April 1986. In his memoirs, Peterson writes that he reported the information about the naval officers to the Palme Murder Inquiry. Palme was shot dead at 23:20 on the street outside the Skandia House (the former Thule building) at Sveavägen 44 on February 28, 1986. “Sveavägen” was the street of “Mother Sweden”; Thule was the Palme family company, which had been taken over by the Wallenberg family and been turned into the headquarters for the Swedish Stay-Behinds. Ministers, senior military officers, and security service officers thought in terms of a dual state, and they had a total lack of confidence in each other. The SÄK collaborated closely with its U.S. counterpart, and former Social-Democratic Minister and Ambassador Carl Lidbom—investigating the SÄK after the murder of Palme—told the Chief of SÄK Sune Sandström that it was important that the government had confidence in the SÄK. According to Lidbom, Sandström replied that “it is equally important that SÄK has confidence in the government.”

In early and mid-1980s, the U.S. security state no longer trusted “Political Sweden” and signaled its discontent to its Swedish security elite. “Political Sweden” was playing around with trust and there was a strong pressure for removing the dissident element. Former Chief of Operations at SÄK, Olof Frånstedt, argued that the Palme Murder Inquiry should primarily have focused on Palme as a possible traitor; the killing was most likely a political murder, he claimed. When the Palme Murder Inquiry ignored this aspect, it either did not know what it was doing, Frånstedt said, or it ignored this fact precisely because it knew what it was doing. In other words, it knew that it had to present a coverup. Former Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Andersson stated that it was a group within SÄK that operated against Prime Minister Palme and looked upon him as a “threat to Swedish security.” At a press conference in 1985, Bertil Wedin, a London-based consultant and South African intelligence operative, as well as a former Swedish intelligence officer, editor of the Wallenberg bank newsletter and a Swedish representative to the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), said:

“I am working against Palme and the Swedish Government. I am doing that in cooperation with the intelligence services in the Scandinavian countries. For me it is important to work against Palme. SÄK and the Swedish military are clearly in conflict with its own Government.”

The South African colonel and death squad leader Eugene de Kock told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 that South African agent Craig Williamson as well as his subordinate Bertil Wedin had been involved in the Palme murder. Two English-speaking men, with an accent believed to be South African, had told two witnesses in Stockholm two weeks before the murder that they were in Sweden to kill Palme. They had displayed several weapons, one a gun equipped with a silencer that corresponded to the weapon that was used for the murder. But there were also a number of other warnings. Eight days before the killing, a former representative of the then CIA-led WACL, Anders Larsson, handed in a warning to Palme and to Foreign Minister Sten Andersson about the upcoming killing of Palme. The information supposedly came from right-wingers close to SÄK; they wanted to stop Palme’s trip to Moscow. The decision had been taken by the CIA’s Covert Action Department, Larsson argued. The Governor of the city of Norrköping, Henry Eriksson, reported to the Prime Minister’s Office six weeks before the killing that SÄK/police officers (linked to the WACL) were preparing a

coup d’état against Palme before his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in April 1986. In December 1985, a MI6 officer, “Mack” Falkirk, was able to copy the agenda for Palme’s meeting with Gorbachev. According to Falkirk, this agenda had then been used by the CIA in Stockholm to agitate before Swedish officers for the removal of Palme. Five weeks, three weeks and one week before the murder, a Swedish-Yugoslav mercenary, Ivan von Birchan, reported to the Stockholm local government and to the police that he had been offered two million dollars for the killing of Palme, by a comrade in arms from Rhodesia, a CIA agent “Charles Morgan,” who also worked with the Contras in Honduras, who were, in turn, financed by the WACL.

The killing of Prime Minister Palme is still not solved, but at the time the degree of conflict between the democratic state and the security state was certainly unacceptable to both sides, and the serious Cold War tension led the United States and UK to consider the Swedish government a threat to the Northern Flank. While the Military Sweden, according to James Schlesinger, was “planning to get the USA involved as soon as possible,” the Political Sweden was seemingly blocking U.S. access to Sweden, which was more than just problematic because of the increasingly tense relations with the Soviet Union throughout the early 1980s. The Swedish political idea of “neutrality,” a nation-state with different options, may have created a Swedish illusion of “freedom of choice.” Former Swedish Minister of Defense Anders Thunborg told me in November 1998 that “In case of a war, we had several options, and the decision-making was in our hands.” However, letting the access to Swedish airbases depend on “pure chance,” on the views of a Swedish prime minister and his Cabinet, may not have been a U.S. preference. And then, when U.S. plans for assisting Sweden depended on ties not defined in written documents but solely on trust between individuals, the lack of trust in the prime minister became a major security concern. The U.S. security state may have considered the Swedish government an internal Swedish problem as long as the Swedish security state was able to take necessary measures to remove the threat to the Northern Flank.

Here, the sovereign is, in the final analysis, the U.S.-led security hierarchy that demanded a change in Swedish policy. The Schmittian Reich had primacy over the nation-state, and the security state had primacy over the regular democratic state, which implies a divided state, or in Morgenthau’s words, a dual state. The conflict between the Political Sweden and a U.S.-linked Military Sweden had become unacceptable. Carl Schmitt recognized that, in the final analysis, the sovereign is not “double.” The dual state represents a real duality, but in the final analysis, in case of emergency, it is not the democratic state but the security state that will intervene and veto a certain policy, and in the Western world the U.S. security state and its networks inside the single states have had the last word. Or to quote Carl Schmitt: “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception”.