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

Introduction: Maritime Militarism in Two Modern Nation-States

“Navalism,or naval militarism,is the twin brother of militarism on land and bears its repulsive and virulent traits. It is at present, to a still higher degree than the militarism on land, not only the consequence but also the cause of international dangers of a world war.” Thus wrote the German socialist Karl Liebknecht in his famous indictment of militarism, Militarismus und Antimilitarismus, first published in 1907.1 In The Three Men behind the Gun, a pamphlet published seven years later, the Reverend Charles E. Jefferson, a prominent U.S. pacifist, castigated the “militaristic movement” that had spread across the Western world and had led to the “phenomenal expansion of the military and naval establishments” in the past thirty years. “Militarism,” Jefferson wrote,“blights like a pestilent wind the higher life of nations and eats like gangrene into the vitals of civilization.”Among its symptoms were the elevation of the battleship to a “symbol of national glory” and the worship of “the fetish of Sea Power.”2 As these two dissident voices illustrate,images of a new naval“militarism”— as defined by big navies, high levels of naval armaments, and an escalating maritime arms race—became a central part of the discourse on militarization before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Sometimes involving the use of a newly coined term,“navalism” in English or “Marinismus” in German, this Introduction Maritime Militarism in Two Modern Nation-States 2 Introduction discourse drew upon a broad range of political preoccupations and languages ; for better or worse, it has conditioned the understanding of “militarism ,” and particularly its German variant, until the present day.3 The incorporation of “naval militarism” into the analysis and critique of “militarism ,” a term that had first entered European political vocabularies in the 1860s and 1870s,was hardly surprising:this inclusion was a creative response to the rise of what diplomatic historian William L. Langer called the “new navalism” in his classic exploration of the global politics of imperialism, first published in 1930.4 By the turn of the twentieth century, this new militarist formation had become a multifaceted regime of power and knowledge. Its most visible manifestations were powerful battle fleets, and the global naval arms race that emerged as a major international phenomenon with many competitors and shifting centers of gravity.The dramatic international growth of navies, which contrasted sharply with the slow pace of naval armament increases in previous decades,created new,highly dynamic global equations of maritime force.The worldwide diffusion of sea power,which reached its prewar peak in 1914, marked the end of the naval mastery that the British Royal Navy had enjoyed for most of the nineteenth century.5 The magnitude of the arms buildup was most visible in sheer numbers, for,as historian Michael Geyer writes,the“hyper-reality of arms races...can only be appreciated metaphorically in the‘purest’of all representations.”6 In 1880 the aggregate warship tonnage of the six major powers was 1,393,000 tons; ten years later it was 1,649,000 tons. The numbers for 1900, 1910, and 1914 were, respectively, 2,752,000 tons, 5,584,000 tons, and 7,283,000 tons. In short, the tonnage more than quadrupled in the twenty-five years before the outbreak of the GreatWar.7 Not coincidentally, the same period saw the flourishing of comparative statistics of naval strength, with its tabular expressions of maritime force and the “progress” of the world’s navies, eagerly compiled by navy departments and surrounded by exhortations directed at policymaking communities to not fall behind in the maritime arms competition. The massive naval arms buildups marked an important juncture in the militarization of the globe in the “long” twentieth century that emerged out of the transformation of states, empires, and warfare between the 1840s and 1870s.8 The national pursuit of sea power lent shape to a new global geopolitics of war and empire.The entire planet had become a single field of imperial action and site of geopolitical competition, underwritten by global networks of capital, commerce, communications, and transport. Maritime Militarism in Two Modern Nation-States 3 Maritime force and its geopolitical use moved to center stage in a new diplomacy of global empire.This diplomacy filled established European notions of a bellicose Realpolitik with new military and imperial meanings while moving within an interlocking,multipolar global system of states and empires organized around various...