Ola Tunander

Early scholarly career

After obtaining a Masters in economic history (with human geography and history of science and ideas) at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1981, Tunander wrote for philosophical magazines and in 1985 he published two book volumes in Swedish. In 1987, he wrote a volume on United States Maritime Strategy for the Swedish Defence Research Agency. In 1989, he defended his doctoral dissertation at the Department for Technology and Social Change, Linköping University. While finalizing his doctoral thesis Cold Water Politics (1989) on US Maritime Strategy, technology, and the geopolitics of the North, he received a research position at PRIO in Oslo. In 1989, he was appointed Senior Research Fellow and was given tenure. He lectured at the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses and Naval Postgraduate School. In 1995, he became the head of PRIO's Foreign and Security Policy Program. In 2000, he was appointed research professor.

Dialogue projects and writings on region-building, security and identity

From the early 1990s, Tunander wrote on military strategy, confidence-building measures, region-building and US remaking of world order. He headed a Nordic study group, "A new Europe", from mid-1980s with Ole Wæver, Iver B. Neumann, Sverre Jervell, and Espen Barth Eide. Robert Bathurst (PRIO and U.S. Naval Postgraduate School) and Tunander initiated Norwegian-Russian dialogue seminars in the early 1990s. In 1994, he co-edited a volume on the post-Cold War regional cooperation in Arctic Europe, The Barents Region. Tunander wrote contributions about Northern Europe, Nordic Cooperation, and Scandinavism published by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swedish Olof Palme International Center. He contributed to the Russian journal International Affairs. Tunander wrote and edited two Swedish books on power, identity, and territory and co-edited Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe (1997). Some of these books were on the reading lists for universities and military colleges in Europe and the United States, and a number of these projects were carried out for the Norwegian ministries of defence and foreign affairs. After 2000, he organized Nordic-Chinese dialogue conferences with the Chinese Institute of International Studies and the Nordic peace research and international affairs institutes. He also participated in a Washington dialogue. His new focus on China might be explained by his marriage with Yao Xiaoling, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the Chinese reform policy.

Contributions about geopolitics, dual state, and terrorism

In his Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe, Tunander emphasized that the state's traditional friend-foe divide had been supplemented by a cosmos-chaos divide that made European states seek centrality rather than territory and in some cases cut off less developed nationalist territories (i.e., the Czech case in 1993). He wrote articles on geopolitics, "amputation of territories", and the geopolitical scholar Rudolf Kjellén for Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, and Geopolitics, as well as for the Italian journal Limes. He argued in articles and in a book, Government of the Shadows (2009), that U.S. hegemonic power divided the single Western state into a "dual state": a regular democratic hierarchy versus a security hierarchy linked to the U.S. He developed the concept of "dual state" as composed by a regular democratic state or "public state" that acts according to the rule of law, and by a covert "deep state" or "security state" able to veto the decisions of the former (Morgenthau) and to "securitize" regular politics by making certain activities an issue of life and death. Cold War military coups or coup attempts (e.g., in Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, and Spain) were understood in terms of the "veto power" of the "deep state", which "securitized" regular democratic activities by the use of terrorism or what in Italy has been called the "strategy of tension". Tunander quotes his conversation with James Schlesinger, who spoke about a Swedish "dual state": the neutral "Political Sweden" versus the "Military Sweden" that, according to Schlesinger, was "planning to get the USA involved as soon as possible". Tunander quotes U.S. secretaries of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, as saying: when it came to the most sensitive issues, such as the Swedish-U.S. military ties, there was only one rule: "Nothing on paper".

Submarines and PSYOPs

Tunander's study of covert political structures goes back to his experience of high-profile submarine activities in Swedish archipelagos and naval bases in the 1980s. His books from the 1980s accepted the official view. In 1983, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme protested against the "Soviet intrusions". He was forced to cancel his policy and deep-freeze Sweden's diplomatic relations to Moscow. In 1980, 8% of the Swedes viewed the Soviet Union as a direct threat and 33% considered the Soviets as hostile. After a stranded Soviet submarine in 1981 and primarily after a dramatic anti-submarine operation in 1982 with midget submarines inside Swedish naval bases, these figures changed to 42% and 83% respectively, which forced Sweden to deep-freeze its Soviet ties. However, in the 1990s, Tunander was told by U.S. and British officials that these operations were run by the U.S. and the U.K. In 2000, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and former U.K. Navy minister Keith Speed stated on Swedish TV that their subs had operated "regularly" and "frequently" in Swedish waters to test Swedish defenses after navy-to-navy consultations. This information was confirmed by British Chief of Defence Intelligence Air Marshal Sir John Walker. Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Vigleik Eide, and Secretary General of NATO George Robertson added that these were not NATO operations but operations under national command (U.S. and U.K.). This led to a Swedish Government inquiry under Sweden's former Washington Ambassador Rolf Ekéus with Ambassador Mathias Mossberg as Secretary and with Tunander as a civilian expert. Tunander wrote a Swedish book Hårsfjärden (2001), articles for the Swedish Journal of War Sciences, the Zürich-based Parallel History Project, and an English volume for the Frank Cass Naval History Series The Secret War against Sweden: US and British Submarine Deception in the 1980s (2004), which emphasized the submarines' role to change Swedish public opinion and foreign policy. Tunander argued that Soviet submarines might very well have entered Swedish waters, but the more visible operations were most likely PSYOPs decided by a U.S. "deception operation committee" chaired by CIA Director William Casey, and some of them were run by a CIA-Navy liaison office, National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, headed by Secretary of Navy John Lehman.

The reception of the PSYOPs analysis

The Danish Government Inquiry on the Cold War (2005) and the Finnish Cold War History (2006) based their analysis on Tunander's works, which provoked a debate. The author of the Danish inquiry and the authors of the Finnish and Norwegian Cold War histories wrote forewords to Tunander's volume Spelet under ytan (The Game beneath the Surface) for the Swedish Cold War history project (2007). A French-German TV-documentary (by Arte and ZDF, 2005) was largely based on Tunander's work and aired all over Europe. In 2007-2008, Swedish TV aired documentaries based on Tunander's work and The Sunday Times in Britain presented his work. This provoked a controversy. The Royal Swedish Society of Naval Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences organized seminars. Sweden's former chief of defense and former chief of staff wrote articles against Tunander. Tunander was supported by Ambassador Mossberg, the Submarine Inquiry Secretary, who wrote a book I mörka vatten: Hur det svenska folket fördes bakom ljuset i ubåtsfrågan (In Dark Waters: How the Submarines were used to Deceive the Swedish People) (Stockholm, 2009) with a cover text by Ambassador Ekéus. Mossberg, similar to the Danish Government Inquiry and the German TV documentary, stressed Tunander's argument that some operations were very likely U.S. and U.K. PSYOPs. Tunander received similar support from Finnish President Mauno Koivisto, who called the operations "provocations" and recalled Soviet leader Yuri Andropov telling him that the Swedes should sink every intruding submarine, so they could see themselves what turned up. Prime Minister Palme never pointed to the Soviets after his conversation with President Koivisto in August 1983. Tunander was supported by French Naval historian Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix and former U.S. attaché to Moscow Captain Peter Huchthausen. The Swedish controversy, however, is still ongoing with a volume written by Sweden's former Chief of Defence General Bengt Gustafsson 2010. and with a public debate between general Gustafsson and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt on the one hand and Tunander, Ambassador Mossberg, and Ambassador Ekéus on the other.

Books in English

Books in Swedish