Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I

Chapter 6. Commerce, Law, and the Limitation of War

AfterWorldWar I,the German political theorist Carl Schmitt was quick to argue that maritime warfare had helped to pioneer so-called total war, a new practice of war among the great powers.1 The conduct of such “total war” had dissolved the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants , soldiers and civilians: it was built around the potentially unlimited use of force across the civil-military divide.During the FirstWorldWar,the Allied and German naval blockades had been the manifestations of this new type of war.“A hunger blockade,” noted Schmitt,“targets indiscriminately the entire population of the blockaded area, and, thus, the military and civilian population, men and women, the elderly and children.”2 For Schmitt, naval warfare had contained defining “elements” of such a “pure war of extermination” between states well before 1914.3 Since the seventeenth century, war at sea had not been subjected to the same sort of Hegung des Krieges (regulation of war) as its counterpart on land (which, at least in theory, had been turned into a well-regulated armed contest between states, fought out by regular armies).“Naval war,” wrote Schmitt, “not only has its own distinct naval strategic and tactical methods and parameters . In its entirety, this war has always been, to a remarkable degree, a war against the opponent’s trade and economy; and thus a war against Chapter 6 Commerce, Law, and the Limitation of War 150 The Cult of the Battle noncombatants, an economic war, that also affected neutral trade through the legal institutions and practices of prize, contraband, and blockade.”4 From Schmitt’s perspective, the hunger blockades of the First World War simply pushed the peculiarities of Western naval warfare to their logical extreme. Indeed, the official Allied blockade of Germany and the German submarine campaigns played a pivotal role in the “de-bounding of warfare” in World War I, enacting a professional-military war against civilian populations outside existing regimes of military limitation and legal restraint.5 The conduct of a maritime war of economic strangulation transformed previous meanings of naval blockade and commerce-destruction by turning them into a means of potentially starving entire societies to death and destroying their wartime capabilities for economic and social reproduction,as opposed to causing limited economic dislocation and shortages and, possibly, political and social turmoil.6 Wars of maritime extermination pursued victory by turning the entire enemy nation into the object of military force and targeting its infrastructure, cohesion, safety, and, ultimately, collective will. To a remarkable degree, the practice of maritime wars of extermination during (and after) World War I was, however, at odds with prewar U.S. and German naval approaches to warfare. Prior to 1914, German and U.S. naval elites moved within a regime of military and legal limitation when they conceptualized maritime warfare as a war of economic pressure and prepared for the application of military force targeting the opponent’s civilian trade. Far from enacting a predilection for unlimited destruction (a predilection that some scholars have described as a distinctive feature of either American or German “ways of war”7 ), these maritime militarists kept within clear limits the potentially unrestrained nature of naval warfare, as identified by Schmitt. In fact, such investment in the limitation of war lent a distinctive shape to the military thought and practice of the U.S. and German navies;much like the rigid adherence to the concept of battle fleet warfare and the pursuit of regional military power, it, too, set them apart from their British counterpart.8 Considerations of waging war against the opponent’s maritime trade were nonetheless absolutely central to the thinking of German and U.S. navalists before World War I. While preparing their navies for the contest of battle fleets, planners did not discard those features of the war at sea that had always straddled the civil-military divide. Commerce-destruction and commercial blockades occupied an important place in their thinking; in fact, maritime strategists were adamant about the enormous promises (and Commerce, Law, and the Limitation of War 151 grave dangers) of a war of economic pressure given the ever-increasing maritime-economic vulnerabilities of industrial nation-states in a globalizing world. Economic dislocation and social and political turmoil were part of the two navies’ calculus of war. Accordingly, policy makers of the two navies strove to safeguard a proper (legal) space for waging war against the opponent’s trade when...