In other parts of Europe, militarism looked different but it was still an important political and cultural force. It helped protect shipping, trade routes, and colonial ports. Order was kept, and imperial policies were implemented by British land forces in British colonies that included India, Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
British attitudes to the military underwent a transformation in the 19th century. Just like in Germany, British soldiers were glorified and romanticised, both through the media and popular culture. The ranks had been filled with the dregs of the lower class and most of their officers had not received sufficient training. Military Modernisation Military victories, whether in colonial wars or major conflicts like the Crimean War or the Franco-Prussian War , only served to increase the effect that militarism had and intensify nationalism.
Conversely, military defeats like Russia losing to Japan in and the costly victory of Britain in the Boer War exposed problems of militarism and heightened calls for military reform and decreased spending.
Virtually every major European nation was involved in some form of military rejuvenation in the late s and early s. In , W. Stead, a prominent journalist, published a series of articles suggesting that Britain was unprepared for war, particularly its navy. This caused pressure groups like the British Navy League to voice their concerns and press for more ships and personnel. By the early s, the Navy League and the press were calling on the government to commission more battleships. This pressure, coupled with other factors, caused European military expenditure between and to sky-rocket.
The combined military expenditure of the six great powers totalled 94 million pounds in but it had increased by over four times to million pounds by Around 45 percent of Russian government spending was allocated to the armed forces by with only five percent allocated to education.
Every major European power apart from Britain had introduced or increased conscription to expand their armies. This was mostly achieved by youth being forced to join the army. Nationalism created new areas of interest over which nations could compete. For example, The Habsburg empire was tottering agglomeration of 11 different nationalities, with large slavic populations in Galicia and the Balkans whose nationalist aspirations ran counter to imperial cohesion.
Indeed, Serbian nationalism created the trigger cause of the conflict — the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The historical dialogue on this issue is vast and distorted by substantial biases. The notion that Germany was bursting with newfound strength, proud of her abilities and eager to showcase them, was overplayed.
Blame has been directed at every single combatant at one point or another, and some have said that all the major governments considered a golden opportunity for increasing popularity at home.
The Schlieffen plan could be blamed for bringing Britain into the war, the scale of the war could be blamed on Russia as the first big country to mobilise, inherent rivalries between imperialism and capitalism could be blamed for polarising the combatants.
Every point has some merit, but in the end what proved most devastating was the combination of an alliance network with the widespread, misguided belief that war is good for nations, and that the best way to fight a modern war was to attack. That the war was inevitable is questionable, but certainly the notion of glorious war, of war as a good for nation-building, was strong pre The risk here, of course, is that the term becomes somewhat difficult to define, and, as a result, becomes less useful to historical analysis.
With the above issues in mind, to understand the nature of militarism in European society, and the way it could be used to explain the events leading up to the July Crisis , one first needs to understand how the term has been analysed and understood historically.
After a brief look at the history of the term, the analysis turns to popular militarism in Europe, and asks to what extent this can be used to explain the outbreak of the First World War, and the popular support for the war effort. British Liberal and Radical critics of war continued to lump these two — militarism and imperialism — together, both before and after the World War. Thus, J. The British approaches to analyses of militarism — from Spencer onwards — were often predicated on what is termed the Primat der Innenpolitik , or primacy of domestic politics: pressures from within British society, Spencer argued, led to imperial expansion and international tension.
A competing theory saw military organisation — and the level of militarism — as the result of external pressures; this is predicated on the primacy of foreign politics, or Primat der Aussenpolitik. A proponent of this perspective was the German historian Otto Hintze , in a lecture delivered in According to Hintze, states were politically and, by implication, militarily ordered depending on their position in the international system.
Safe from invasion, British self-government was free to develop unimpeded by foreign threats, whereas the continental powers — Prussia, in particular — took a different route.
Leaving navies, and a naval society like pre Britain, outside of a discussion of pre-war militarism creates its own problems, however, of which more later. In the wake of the First World War, and in particular after the Second World War, historians and political scientists have applied various other analyses to the question of what militarism is.
Primat der Aussenpolitik heuristic approach. The broken rifle, for example, was used as a peace symbol by the left in Germany and Scandinavia in the lead-up up to the outbreak of the war. In the political sciences, the relationship between the armed forces and the civilian government has been the focus in numerous studies, from Harold D.
Huntington and Amos Perlmutter , to name but a few of the more influential theorists. There was certainly no shortage of military or military-inspired paraphernalia in pre-First World War Europe. Paul Fussell , who himself wore a U. There were groups for girls as well as boys, and many more organisations catering to a more mature audience. If one were so inclined, a British adult could enjoy membership in a variety of societies linked in one way or another to the armed forces.
The National Service League, from led by the former Commander-in-Chief of the British army, Lord Frederick Roberts , could boast an impressive list of followers on the eve of the war. Among its , supporters in , of which , were active members, the League could list over MPs, according to Anne Summers.
However, the Navy League was beset by infighting and did not have a charismatic leader as Roberts to hold it together. A breakaway group finally left to form the competing Imperial Maritime League in Popular groups like the National Service League and the Navy League received much attention by scholars in the s, not least as part of studies on the rise of what has been termed the radical right, and often as part of comparative studies between Britain and Germany. Serving Army officers tended to avoid the National Service League, and Anne Summers notes that it mainly attracted a Conservative and Anglican membership.
Few working-class members seem to have been interested in joining the organisation. Socialists like Robert Blatchford , editor of the newspaper Clarion , wrote passionately about the need to oppose the perceived threat from Germany, including in articles for the Daily Mail in late , and directly in written correspondence with Lord Roberts.
British society as a whole was hardly paralysed with fear over external aggressors in the pre-First World War decades. With its small army and powerful navy, Britain was in many ways an outlier in the summer of For France and Germany, for example, the mobilisation for war in from an early stage took on the guise of self-defence, whereas the British government instead presented its decision to intervene in defence of small states like Belgium , and as standing up to German aggression — whether this was true or not is neither here nor there.
There are, however, many comparisons that can be made between pre-war popular support for the armed forces and for military action in Britain and in Germany, making this distinction less clear.
In Germany, as in Britain, popular leagues in support of a large navy sprang up in the decades prior to , and these too attracted large memberships. Naturally, there were differences between the two countries, and between the British Navy League and its counterpart, the German Flottenverein Navy League , in particular. The need for an active pressure group in Britain seemed decidedly less important than it did for the promoters of a German battlefleet.
But there are many points of comparison, as well. The launch of a new warship was also a grand public event, and the naval race was therefore intimately tied to the rise of modern mass media. Nationalism was shaped by the printed word. However, the role of nationalism in pre-war politics, and the influence of the press in shaping and promoting it, remains unclear. Newspapers, in particular the large-circulation papers and periodicals, like the aforementioned Daily Mail in Britain, have often received a bad press from historians.
The written word in an age of mass media never pulled consistently in one direction, and any interested reader could pick up and read a range of different opinions in newspapers across the continent, apart from the limitations put in place by state censorship , of course.
Countries with large left-wing parties also had large-circulation newspapers with left-leaning — and often quite explicitly anti-militaristic — opinions, and readers probably had a tendency to seek out and read the papers they agreed with, rather than radically change their own political standpoints if and when a newspaper told them to. Even when newspapers and other publications seemed to argue for specific ideas, they were often read in different ways by a readership that was able to read and interpret such ideas according to their own convictions.
For example, there has long been a tendency in scholarship to portray Britain, in particular, as fearful of foreign invaders in the period leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. While some, like Robert Blatchford, dedicated their time and their pens to try to warn the public of the dangers of war and invasion, little research has been done on how the British public reacted to their warnings.
When on country improved their army and general armed force, all the other had the idear to grow, causing every country to grow bigger and better. The naval race between Great Britain and Germany from to caused great friction among the two nations and was one of the causes for World War I. It began in and ended in America witnessed much devastation in this time period. In these four years alone nearly 9 million people died and millions more were maimed, crippled, grief stricken, or psychologically scarred Coetzee, World War I is considered by some, the first man-made catastrophe of the twentieth century.
Nicole Beliakov Geography Rise in nationalism in Europe is not a new phenomenon. The history of Europe is marred by two world wars, when nationalism flourished and led to the enormous loss of human lives. During these wars, manifestations of nationalism were especially overt and even obligatory because European governments needed a justification of wars in order to mobilize people, to maintain morale and readiness of citizens to provide labor, resources, and to sacrifice their lives for the cause, and nationalism was a powerful doctrine that provided such justification.
After the second world war, to avoid repetition of these tragic events, European nations began their steady advance towards economic and political integration, which culminated in the establishment of the European Union. Presently, the very foundation of the EU is under the threat due to nationalism, which has risen in prominence and popularity in the context of rising inequality, immigration of people of not only different ethnicities but also different religions, economic crises, terrorism, and shortcomings of EU system of governance.
Many scholars study about WW1 and what caused this huge conflict. Germany used to be responsible for this was, but after many controversial debates later, the blame was gradually put on the different great powers of Europe as well. In this piece of writing, the main causes of WWI will be analyzed, especially targeting the long-term causes. World War One was a time of struggle in Europe. How did World War 1 Start? There have been many wars in the world all for different reasons.
0コメント