Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I by Dirk Bönker (review)

The years before World War I featured arms races on land and at sea, and in the case of the latter, the Anglo-German naval competition has featured prominently in accounts of the origins of the conflict. The naval ambitions of Emperor Wilhelm II and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, supported by an active Navy League and a willing majority in the Reichstag, had fateful consequences, contributing to Britain's rapprochement with its traditional rivals, France and Russia, and solidifying Europe's pre-1914 armed camps. During the same years the United States emerged as a world power, claiming its own colonial empire (mostly at the expense of Spain, in 1898) and, like Germany, building a large, modern fleet. By the onset of World War I, Germany and the United States had become the second and third naval powers behind Britain, as well as Britain's leading industrial and commercial competitors. In this groundbreaking study, Dirk Bönker compares the parallel phenomena of turn-of-the-century German and American navalism, and finds more similarities than one might expect.

Bönker approaches his subject thematically, dividing his work into sections on naval strategies of world power, approaches to maritime warfare, the position of the navy vis-à-vis the political and economic systems of the nation-state, and, finally, the naval profession and its role in shaping the discourse of navalism. In each case, his comparative approach reveals commonalities of thinking between German and US naval elites. On the strategic level, both subscribed to geopolitical views common to the era, taking for granted that military maritime power provided essential underpinning for, as well as protection of, commercial maritime power. This mindset accepted naval warfare "as the continuation of commercial rivalry by other means" (27). Their approaches to warfare thus included the acceptance of a "war of maritime extermination" as a natural component of an "existential conflict between competing empires" (171). Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare, and the United States's acceptance of, and (after 1917) participation in, the Allied blockade of Germany, both in contravention of established principles of international law, reflected this mentality.

In discussing the articulation of the navy's relationship with the state and its institutions, Bönker acknowledges the interwar work of émigré historian Alfred Vagts in pointing out the similarities in the political strategies and public propaganda of the two navies before World War I. In both Germany and the United States, the attitudes of naval leaders reflected their enthusiasm for "nondemocratic elite rule, centralized state power, and national industry" (225). The most influential American naval writer, Captain (later Admiral) Alfred Thayer Mahan, shared with Tirpitz a disdain for socialism and, like the German admiral, promoted a navy-centered nationalism as an antidote to it. Finally, in his discussion of the role of the officer corps of the two navies in shaping the discourse of navalism, Bönker concludes that "German and US cultures were cut from the same cloth" (304). In their approach to war as a science rather than as an art, in their overall "professional rationality," and in their rigid adherence to doctrine, the two navies had much more in common with each other than either of them had with the British.

Bönker closes with a comment on the role of World War I in putting the two navies on dramatically different courses thereafter. Following Germany's defeat and near-disarmament, its navy eagerly embraced the second chance at greatness afforded by Nazi rule, only to experience its ultimate destruction in World War II. Meanwhile, for the United States, the navy's limited role in World War I, followed by the frustrating restrictions of the Washington Treaty of 1922 and the postwar regime of naval arms limits, did nothing to diminish the ambitions forged by the naval elite before 1914...