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

Chapter 9. A Politics of Social Imperialism

Chapter 9 A Politics of Social Imperialism In an oft-cited letter from December 1895,Alfred vonTirpitz wrote that Germany needed to create a powerful navy and promote its maritime interests “not the least so because in the new great national goal and the associated economic gain lies a strong palliative against educated and uneducated Social Democrats.”1 In so doing, the future navy secretary offered a socialimperialist rationale for the pursuit of German global power and maritime force;he also directly borrowed language from an article published the previous year by AlfredThayer Mahan. In “The Prospects of an Anglo-American Reunion,”which appeared in the North American Review in November 1894, Mahan had written about the beneficial impact of U.S.active engagement in geopolitics and presented it as an anti-socialist endeavor. Only such engagement , he had argued, could foster a “reviving sense of nationality, which is the true antidote to what is bad in socialism.”2 In each country, makers of navalism offered social-imperial formulations that related the pursuit of global power and maritime force to matters of national governance, reform, and societal order. Transcending the two navies’ pursuit of institutional power, societal resources, and public prominence , these formulations centered on the (re)making of Germany and the United States as integral nation-states. They set the cause of the nation A Politics of Social Imperialism 225 against its alleged enemies from within, be they socialist or otherwise, and fused it to nondemocratic elite rule, centralized state power, and national industry. Such linkages saturated navalist discourse. No doubt, the navies’ pursuit of global power and maritime force was always an exercise in domestic policy and political domination, to invoke the mantra of all those analysts of German maritime militarism who follow in the footsteps of radical historian Eckart Kehr.3 But there were also significant differences in the connections that the two national communities of naval militarists drew between maritime force, global empire, and a proper order at home.4 The Germans envisioned the forging of a cohesive nation in the crucible of global empire within the framework of a monarchical nation-state, decisive governmental leadership from above, and limited social reform.These emphases reflected the presence of both a vigorous socialist labor movement and of a powerful monarchical-bureaucratic state with a long-standing tradition of social intervention . In the United States, the absence of a strong national bureaucratic state and the relative weakness of a distinct working-class politics ensured that a primary emphasis of any social-imperialist project was on the creation of a strong administrative state insulated from participatory politics and electoral pressures.Thus,American officers tied their nationalist case for world power to a bid for bureaucratic expert government within the constitutional shells of republican governance. At the same time, they elaborated on the domestic benefits of empire within the framework of a politics of moral reform, racial exclusion, corporation-dominated industry , and reactionary welfarism (that is, the promise of material prosperity through empire without redistributive politics). German Visions of the State Fusing the causes of global power, the nation, and elite rule, Tirpitz and his fellow officers promoted the making of a “new” Germany under nationalist , technocratic, and industrial auspices.5 Their vision of governance cohered around several elements.The commitment to Germany as a nationstate , and not to the Prussian state, or any subnational particularism, ranked most prominent among them. Tirpitz and other naval policy makers all promoted strengthening the powers of the national state.The plans for a powerful national ministry of maritime affairs, which Tirpitz advanced at the turn of the century, exemplified this orientation.6 So did the consistent 226 The Quest for Power support of new direct taxes on the national level, which was to end the empire’s fiscal reliance on the federal states and advance the costly naval buildup and the expansion of other national services.7 Such fixation on the nation-state was evident in the self-image of the navy as an exemplary national organization and custodian of the German nation as a global people.This view emphasized that the navy served and represented the nation-state as a whole:it would function as a nationalizing “melting pot” that recruited its personnel from all walks of life, regions, and confessions.8 Moreover, the navy was forging, through overseas service, special bonds with Germans abroad. It was the key “link...