Militarism is defined as the prevalence of military sentiments among a people, or the tendency to regard military efficiency as the paramount interest of the state. Defined in this way, it is a not-very-useful term that covers most societies in history until the present day. The need to defend oneself is a prerequisite for any stable society, and for most of history a degree of militarism was a necessity, not a choice. It is notable that the tradition of non-militarism among the English-speaking peoples emerged in countries where the danger of invasion was limited or non-existent over nearly a millennium.
As a more refined term of political analysis, the term has been traced back to the memoirs of Madame de Chastenay, who used it with reference to Napoleon's glorification of war and the trappings thereof. After that the word fell into disuse until the 1860s when Proudhon revived it to attack the authoritarian mentality that viewed war as means of mobilizing man's best energies. The concept gained wide acceptance and appeared as a neologism in contemporary European encyclopaedias and journals. Over the next decades the term took on two meanings. On the one hand, it was used, in a narrow sense, to describe the intrusion of military considerations into the process of political and diplomatic decision-making. Thus a particular country's (foreign) policy was deemed ‘militaristic’ if policy-formulation had become dominated by the military. On the other hand, there emerged a broader notion of ‘social militarism’ which was seen to exist in countries in which military values and mentalities had percolated into civilian society and had permeated the political culture. It was with these two meanings that scholars subsequently employed the concept for analysing certain types of political systems and societies.
The notion of a dichotomy dividing two different types of socio-political systems and indeed entire societies not only informed all scholarly discussion of ‘militarism’ throughout this century, but also was probably implied from the very beginning. Still, it assumed sharper conceptual contours only at the end of the 19th century, when sociologists and political economists joined the debate. One of the earliest systematizers was Herbert Spencer. In his Principles of Sociology he identified a ‘militant type of society’ which he defined as one in which ‘all men fit for fighting act in concert against other societies’. Insofar as those ‘other societies’ were not themselves of the ‘militant type’, Spencer sharply contrasted them as ‘industrial’ societies in which the defence of man's ‘individuality becomes the society's essential duty’. In the latter, ‘life, liberty and property are secure and all interests justly regarded’. For the same reason they did not require ‘a despotic controlling agency’. Spencer appreciated that the lines between these two types of society were occasionally blurred and that ‘militant’ societies could be engaged in industrial production. But his point was that they were merely ‘industrially occupied, not industrially organised’. Ultimately Spencer advanced his taxonomy both to buttress a liberal-evolutionary view of human history and to demonstrate that the industrial states would inevitably replace the more backward ‘militant’ systems. To him, industrialism was of course synonymous with modern capitalism.
Other scholars subsequently tried to refine Spencer's scheme. One who was directly inspired by him was the influential German constitutional historian Hintze, who introduced an epochal and geographic differentiation. His work on militarism is furthermore significant because he designed his arguments explicitly to rebut the Marxist line on the subject. If militarism for Spencer and Hintze was a manifestation of pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies, for Marxists all pre-socialist systems were basically militaristic. In other words, while they, too, developed a grand scheme of societal change over time, contrary to the liberals they believed that capitalist-industrial societies were just as prone to produce militarism as pre-industrial and pre-capitalist ones.
The Marxist argument took two forms. Some, like Hilferding and Lenin, integrated the concept into their theory of capitalist imperialism and viewed it as part of Europe's violent expansion abroad. Others, like Rosa Luxemburg, focused on the domestic angle of arms manufacturers and the arms races they sponsored, postulating that militarism represented the means of economic exploitation and political repression of the proletariat. Armaments, Luxembourg believed, secured the domestic status quo against workers' protests and demands for fundamental change. And they kept the population in a state of tension, excitement, and fear about an impending foreign war in which working-class men would be the cannon fodder.
Theory and practice being inseparable in Marxism, the insights gained into the workings of capitalism were to be used in the struggle to overthrow it. The working-class movements of Europe were not only to fight for a transformation, by revolution or by radical reform, of the existing socio-economic order, they were also to fight against ‘militarism’, which they saw as a basic evil in capitalist-industrial societies. In Germany, which had the largest and best organized working-class movement in Europe, agitation was stepped up not only against the brutal treatment of recruits and the militarization of politics, but also against the arms race and the kaiser's adventurist foreign policy. Karl Liebknecht was one of the most impassioned anti-militarist speakers at Social Democratic rallies. All of this vanished like mist before a strong wind when war broke out and all thoughts of international proletarian solidarity went out of the window. The socialist international never recovered.
The debate about militarism revived with the emergence of fascism and Nazism and it was not about whether or not they were militaristic. Of course they were, proudly and openly. Marxists were concerned to link the phenomenon to bourgeois capitalism and to what they thought to be its worsening crisis after WW I. Some, it is true, saw fascism as an outgrowth of a backward capitalism typical of post-WW I Italy, but Hitler looked to many Marxists more like a henchman of an advanced capitalist system. A similar difference of opinion emerged with regard to Japan and its militarism in the 1930s and early 1940s. The crucial point is that whatever internal variations there may have been, for Marxists militarism became even more directly associated with capitalism than it had been before 1914.
The problem was that both fascism and Nazism presented themselves as a ‘third way’, not merely anti-communist but also anti-capitalist and anti-liberal. It was because of this self-representation and of the repressive policies that stemmed from it that liberals, pursuing Spencer and Hintze's arguments, argued in an evolutionary-developmental vein that militarism could occur only in societies that had not fully industrialized and did not have a parliamentary-representative political system and civic culture. The association of militarism with relative backwardness was further refined following 1945, when it merged with modernization theory, particularly as elaborated by American social scientists.
If there is one generalization to be made about the use of the concept of militarism in public and scholarly debate during the 20th century, it is that the two schools of thought continued to argue their respective cases across the ideological fence that separated them on every issue. After 1917 the liberals also began to raise the question of a Bolshevik or ‘red’ militarism and linked the concept to an expanded notion of backwardness which included not merely pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, or industrializing societies, but also socialist ones. This assumption gained its greatest popularity during the Cold War and became not merely an explicit propaganda weapon but also a means of understanding the power structures of the Soviet system. In connection with the western debate on the emergence of an American Military-Industrial Complex (see Eisenhower) in the 1960s and 1970s, Vernon Aspaturian tried to identify a similar phenomenon in communist societies and discerned ‘a polarisation of men and institutions into a security-producer-ideological grouping and a consumer- agricultural-public services grouping’.
After the collapse of the USSR the question of a ‘red militarism’ lost its significance as an ideological weapon and is now being treated as a purely historical phenomenon, as scholars delve into the Soviet archives in their attempt to reconstruct what made the Soviet system tick. The questions to be answered are whether the Soviet marshals ever occupied a position powerful enough to challenge the primacy of the Soviet Communist Party and the Kremlin leadership (‘political militarism’), and whether the militarization of Soviet society in WW II and during the Cold War amounted to ‘social militarism’?
Owing to this approach there is one final twist to the non-Marxist discussion of militarism. It arose with regard to countries of the Third World. Since quite a few of them were run by military regimes, in the 1950s and 1960s social scientists began to debate how far the professional officers, having seized power in these countries and particularly in Latin America, in fact acted as modernizers. It was also central to the argument that contrasted temporary, superficial ‘authoritarian’ regimes with deep-rooted ‘totalitarian’ regimes which aimed at permanently altering a society and perpetuating themselves. The notion that the military could act as stewards was never widely accepted and is now seldom heard.
With the end of the Cold War, the concept of militarism has lost most of the ideological steam that seemed to make it worth discussing. It is rarely used to describe present-day systems and policies but instead is seen as a phenomenon of the past to be examined with the tools of the historian. What may have been lost thereby is the study of militarism as merely one aspect of the whole ‘ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’ philosophy to which many subscribe who would be appalled to be described as militarists.
Bibliography
- Aspaturian, Vernon, on the Soviet Military-Industrial Complex, Journal of International Affairs, 26 (1972).
- Berghahn, Volker R., Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861-1979 (New York, 1981).
- Gillis, John R. (ed.), The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick, NJ, 1989).
- Stargardt, Nicholas, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866-1914 (Cambridge, 1994).
- Vagts, Alfred, A History of Militarism (London, 1938)
— V. R. Berghahn/Hugh Bicheno
