History
Weltpolitik
"Weltpolitik" was a term used in late 19th and early 20th century Germany to describe the country's pursuit of a global policy and its desire for a prominent role in world affairs. Coined by German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, it reflected Germany's aspirations for colonial expansion and a more assertive foreign policy. This approach contributed to the tensions that ultimately led to World War I.
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9 Key excerpts on "Weltpolitik"
- John Lowe(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Furthermore, Weltpolitik was the logical form for this expansion to take since a European great power, anxious to pursue great power politics in this era, necessarily had to embark on a world power policy. But, in contrast to the Fischer school, Schöllgen finds little evidence of a rigorous concept or well-formulated objective behind Bülow’s pursuit of Weltpolitik from 1897 to 1909. For Bülow, world policy seems to have meant little more than an assertion of Germany’s right to ‘a place in the sun’ or ‘the right to equality with other great nations’. Weltpolitik may therefore have represented a general desire to ‘catch up’ with the other great powers in imperialist activity, something that had been neglected by Germany’s leaders for a decade after 1886. However, the lack of planning and the divergence of views among Bülow, Holstein, Tirpitz and the Kaiser resulted in fumbling around all over the world. As a consequence, Germany’s sudden intrusion into Asia, Africa or the Middle East tended to bewilder the other powers, who ascribed sinister motives to Germany’s unexpected behaviour. In this sense Geiss’s recent characterization of Weltpolitik as ‘the most explosive version of modern imperialism’ seems very apt. That Germany had little choice but to expand overseas in order to demonstrate its status as a great power seems evident enough. This still left Germany’s leaders with some options. Despite the complications arising from a conflict between ideology and economic interest, they could still choose between cooperation with another great power (either Russia or Britain) and the policy of the ‘free hand’, the policy which Bülow actually adopted, which risked alienating most of the other powers
eBook - ePub- Geiss(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
(7) Powerful economic and political interests of the ruling classes were at work when the German Empire began to develop as an Imperialist Power. A spectacular, dazzling and successful policy abroad would hopefully offer a distraction from tensions at home. This escape mechanism had been seen by German historians at work in France under Napoleon III and in Russia under Nicholas II; but they refused to see that this method was being used at home under Wilhelm II as well. The ‘Weltpolitik’ of Imperial Germany had many of the characteristics commonly ascribed to Bonapartism. Recent research has discovered this trend in Bismarck's colonial policy, and his method of unifying Germany was criticized by many of his opponents in similar terms. (8) The dynamics of German ‘Weltpolitik’ can also be understood against the background of German history in the nineteenth century. United Germany was to expand into the world, as Prussia had expanded within Germany. (9) Twenty-five years after the founding of the German Empire, conditions for an imperialist policy seemed favourable: Germany's unification in 1871 had created the territorial basis for future imperialist expansion. The Triple Alliance, the acquisition of Heligoland and the system of commercial treaties under Caprivi had expanded and consolidated both the economic and political basis of Germany's position in Europe. (10) The spell of colonial activities under Bismarck pointed to the direction of further expansion in a period of active ‘Weltpolitik’. The rise of German industry and commerce made further expansion and the building of a strong German fleet plausible and possible, to protect German commerce and colonies overseas, as the argument ran
eBook - ePubFighting for Status
Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics
- Jonathan Renshon(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Colonies and a larger naval fleet were always perceived by leaders as a means of achieving their goals rather than being goals themselves. These policies are thus better thought of as a reflection of the true goals of German Weltpolitik, not its core. In fact, Mommsen argues that “German ‘world politics’ was not concerned with concrete territorial acquisitions at all, but only with the prestige associated with Imperial Germany’s participation in all affairs concerning its overseas empire.” 30 In this, the German belief that colonies would bring increased international standing was typical of the time period. A French statesperson at the turn of the century remarked, “To remain a great nation, or to become one, you must colonize.” 31 One potential concern in these descriptions of Weltpolitik is that we might be overlooking potentially important variation among Germany’s leadership. After all, while Wilhelm was the ultimate authority, he had plenty of advisers whose disagreement on other issues is by now well known. Yet on the larger issues of motivations and goals—of what German leaders wanted —there was little disagreement. Kennedy nicely sums up this agreement by noting that an “ideological consensus” for Weltpolitik existed: “not that it was a unanimously accepted programme, but that the pursuit of a greater German role in world affairs was regarded as both understandable and desirable by virtually all who had an influence upon external policy.” 32 Thus, the important differences (such as disagreement on what kind of navy to build and for what purpose) were in general on how best to achieve the ends that most everybody agreed to be the ultimate goal: a greater role in world affairs and improved standing in the international system. 33 The Roots of German Status Dissatisfaction Of course, desiring status would have not distinguished Germans from any other state in the nineteenth century
eBook - ePubGlobal Population
History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth
- Alison Bashford(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
Part II The Politics of Earth, 1920s and 1930s
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War and Peace
Population, Territory, and Living Space
… a problem which is now menacing the peace of the world.
GEORGE HANDLEY KNIBBS, THE SHADOW OF THE WORLD’S FUTURE(1928 )Imperial Germany entered World War I loudly proclaiming its need for Raum. German foreign policy was strongly influenced by the Geopolitiker, scholars who detailed the theory (and indeed the practice) that “vital” nation-states were not fixed in Westphalian agreement, but were necessarily and organically expansive.1 In this system of thought about people, land, and political territory—this geopolitical worldview—population pressure was both metaphor and quasi-physical law. “Organic-biological Weltanschauung of the Geopolitikers,” émigré Robert Strausz-Hupé explained, “is the urge to territorial expansion involving the revolutionary use of the population pressure of a growing nation.”2 At one level, the “pressure” argument employed by imperial German leaders, developed by second-generation Geopolitiker in Weimar Germany, and implemented as policy by the Nazis over the 1930s,3 was a nationalist ruse for the acquisition of territory and power and widely understood to be so by the world’s statesmen and scholars alike. But at another level, this formative idea of classical geopolitics had much in common with emerging Anglophone geography and demography. In general, they agreed with the geopolitical proposition that the world had become a closed system because of colonial expansion into all continents over the preceding three hundred years: without “empty land” to claim, colonizing nations struggled both with each other and with an emerging Asian nationalism. This was what made the twentieth century a new epoch, involving a global struggle for power.4
eBook - ePub- Daniel S. Allemann, Anton Jäger, Valentina Mann(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Geopolitik.Contravening against this, recent work by Alison Bashford and others has shed light on a global geopolitical moment visible, in its extreme points, in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Anglophone Political Geographies, and extending into the post-war era, the spatial gaze of Fernand Braudel’s maritime histories.5 Against geopolitical self-representation, this literature views geopolitics as an exercise in space-making rather than panoptic description.6 My revisiting of the privileged disseminator of geopolitical thinking in the Weimar period, Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (‘Journal for Geopolitics’; hereafter: ZfG), will help to redress – and historicize – the nevertheless persistent reduction of the German case of geopolitics to a species of space-grabbing nationalism and militarism. My examination is informed by the unlikely ‘entanglement’ that, as Kris Manjapra has shown,7 drew Karl Haushofer to the Bengali sociologist and economist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), but moves beyond this singularity to reconstruct a unique projection of anti-colonial modernity that connected India and Germany in the interwar years, in radically new ways. Haushofer’s Geopolitik aimed to gain revolutionary momentum from anti-colonial nationalisms in the East. To Haushofer and to Sarkar, Geopolitik blueprinted the science of the state in the global age. This science combined optimistic futurities and projections of emancipation with a rhetoric of ‘just-so’ sobriety in political thought. As this article will argue, Geopolitik as it was formalized in Haushofer’s group, including Benoy Sarkar, anticipated the globalization discourse by its claims to, and harnessing of, the global now-time. Crucially, this history troubles the identification of a commitment to ‘the global’ with a liberal ideology. My objective is to restore Geopolitik to the intellectual history of time and to the discipline dealing with it – History. Scholars have failed to tease out the temporal structure of Geopolitik because they have not recognized it as an intervention – if one coming from a rogue disciplinary vantage point – in the crisis of historicism and its particular Weimar fractures.8 Indeed, it was not with geographers but with established historians such as Friedrich Meinecke, next to proponents of the emergent discipline of Political Science, that Kjellén’s Geopolitik first gained any traction in Germany – and not until theories outbreak of the First World War prompted a search for new directions.9 Geopolitik prefigured the layering of different strata of historical time and their relative significance that is seen as Fernand Braudel’s contribution to theorisations of time.10 Haushofer’s notion of ‘the secular’ (das Säkulare), defined as ‘that which lasts’ (das Dauernde) in opposition to ‘daily noise’ (Tageslärm) – a play on ‘daily political news’ (Tagespolitik) – prompts a comparison with Braudel’s conceptualization of a longue durée as distinct from a middling moyenne durée and the singularity of the événement on the surface-level of time.11 ‘The secular’ defines the proper subject of Geopolitik: it makes a qualitative statement about profundity rather than duration. Socio-political movement that Braudel would brush off as événement, points the geopolitical initiate to momentous transformation. Where Braudel privileged time as the category through which civilisational space (the Mediterranean12 ) is understood, Haushofer’s Geopolitik elevated space over time. In a rare article to address this relation directly, the ZfG’s involved publisher-contributor Kurt Vowinckel opined that History and Geopolitik now contended for precedence as the ‘universal science’ (Universalwissenschaft). All other sciences would be relegated to auxiliaries deriving their analytical framework from either space or time.13 The geo-historian Braudel viewed history as developing with the painfully slow ground pace, quite literally, of the earth, close to a standstill.14 For Haushofer, whose spatial maneuvres appeared more like a snapshot of time, this would have spelt insufferable statism. Haushofer’s Geopolitik declared a state of global synchronicity in geographic dispersion (in the sense of what Penelope Corfield and others before her have called the ‘latitudinal’ dimension of space instead of ‘longitudinal’ time).15
eBook - ePubThe War that Ended Peace
How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War
- Margaret MacMillan(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Profile Books(Publisher)
Weltmachtstellung , or ‘world power’.The terms reflected the widespread notion among patriotic Germans that the country’s remarkable economic progress, the rapid spread of German investment and trade around the world, and Germany’s advances in such areas as science ought to be matched by an increase in its standing in the world. Other nations must recognise Germany’s achievements and its changed position. For liberals this meant Germany providing moral leadership. As one of them wrote wistfully from the vantage point of the 1940s: ‘My thoughts always wander back to the time when [we] co-operated in that fine effort: work for Greater Germany, peaceful expansion and cultural activities in the Near East … A peaceful Germany, great, honoured and respected.’25 For right-wing nationalists, though, and that included the Kaiser and his closest advisers as well as the numerous members of patriotic societies, it meant rather political and military power and, if necessary, a struggle against other powers.In those years while the new Kaiser and Germany were feeling their strength, an elderly history professor was attracting packed audiences at his lectures at the University of Berlin. Heinrich von Treitschke was one of the intellectual fathers of the new German nationalism with its longing for a place in the sun. Through his lectures and writings, which included a very popular multi-volume history of Germany, he influenced a whole generation of Germany’s leaders to take pride in the great German past and in the extraordinary achievements of Prussia and the Prussian army in building the German state. For Treitschke patriotism was the highest of all values and war was not only a necessary part of human history but a noble and elevating one. If only Germany seized its opportunities, it would rise, as it deserved, to world dominance.26 He was, said Bülow, whose favourite writer he was, the ‘prophet of the national idea’.27 When Helmuth von Moltke, the future chief of the German general staff, read Treitschke’s history as a young man he was ‘captivated’ and wrote later to his wife that ‘a spirit of patriotism and love of the German Fatherland drifts through the whole work, without violating historical truth; it is superb’.28 The Kaiser was surprisingly lukewarm; although he liked the general drift of Treitschke’s writings, the historian did not praise the Hohenzollerns highly enough.29
eBook - ePub- Geoffrey Parker(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Geopolitik which developed in the 1920s had a far more rational approach to the achievement of national fulfilment. From the beginning it was in the business of both explanation and prescription. There was the explanation of how the disaster had ever been allowed to take place at all, and the prescription for how Germany could once again be restored to her rightful place in Europe. The study of spatial reality was to be used to shed light on the German predicament and spatial remedies were to be administered to the sickly, but soon remarkably co-operative, patient.It was in Munich that Geopolitik originated and developed in the years after World War I, and it was always especially associated with this city although it later came to be studied at many German universities. Weigert commented on the particularly intense atmosphere in those years and pointed out that ‘Munich had always been the intellectual cauldron in which fantastic and mysterious German concoctions were brewed’.12 Spengler, Hitler and Haushofer all lived and worked in this city which was also the home of German National Socialism.The central figure in German Geopolitik was Professor Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), the son of a Bavarian schoolmaster who rose to the rank of Major-General in the Imperial army. He travelled widely and cultivated a lifelong interest in the Far East and especially in Japan. This latter country was to recur over the years as one of his most favoured geopolitical models. Like Kjellén before him, he became increasingly absorbed in the relationship between geography and political activity and was convinced that the location and territorial characteristics of states were the principal determinants of their destiny. He was instrumental in establishing the Institut für Geopolitik in Munich, and in 1924 became the first editor of its journal, Zeitschrift für Geopolitik. Subsequently Facts in Review, published in English, was to inform students in the Anglo-Saxon countries of the kind of geopolitical ideas which were emanating from Munich. This was, of course, largely propaganda which attempted to put Geopolitik in the best possible light for overseas consumption. The Munich institute soon became the recognised centre for the study of the subject and Karl Haushofer remained its principal exponent. His son Albrecht, a friend of Rudolf Hess, also became a geopolitician, and appears to have helped introduce Geopolitik
eBook - ePubBeyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace
Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche
- Jean-François Drolet(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- McGill-Queen's University Press(Publisher)
In an influential 1879 article, with which Nietzsche would certainly have been familiar, Treitschke had painted an alarming picture of the conflicting strategic interests of Germany, Britain, Russia, France, and Austria. Emphasizing the growth of British naval power and the expansionist ambitions of Tsarist Russia, he called for a more authoritarian conception of the state matched by a more nationalist strain of patriotism that would help to foment popular support for colonialism and discriminatory measures against immigration. 23 The term “great politics” (Grosse Politik) in those public debates was often used to praise the tactical manoeuvring with which the chancellor was manipulating the relationship between international relations and domestic politics in order to carve a place for the newly unified Germany on the world stage. As Peter Bergmann explains, in the German language, “the term has a familiar, majestic ring, one rooted in the then fashionable conviction of the primacy of foreign policy, of a higher form of politics specifically addressing European and world power conflicts in contradistinction to a presumably lesser form of politics dealing with internal matters.” 24 For Nietzsche, however, there was nothing “great” about Bismarck’s foreign policy ambitions
- Madhavan K. Palat(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
14 had to be global in their awareness and competitive ambition. It was no longer given to anyone to remain purely European, to carve out separate empires, to retreat into ‘tradition,’ and still less to ascend into the mists of Shangri-La. A unified world that could not expand outward except into space must reorder itself toward internal cohesion through intensified competition between power blocs. The multiple centres of global power must inexorably amalgamate into smaller numbers but larger units; the final contest must be in some sense bipolar or between two centres; and ultimately a hegemon must emerge. The much-cherished sovereignty of states, especially of national states, must submit to this relentless logic and subordinate itself to power blocs that would compete for mastery. Geopolitical theory sought to explicate this process and identify the players.The portents of global unity were sensed in many different ways. Friedrich Ratzel, who died in 1904, formulated something akin to a law of amalgamation of small states into bigger and bigger ones15 until he arrived at the conclusion that ‘There is on this small planet sufficient space for only one great state.’16 His admirer, Rudolf Kjellén, chose to quote the British prime minister, Salisbury, on the law of large states becoming larger and small states smaller, coupled with Marx’s dictum that the factory grew at the expense of handicraft.17 With exceptional clarity he saw a single global politics, its hierarchy of states, the distinction between great powers and world powers, and the world powers as an ‘aristocracy’ that ruled the world. Like true aristocracies, they were not subject to law which they framed as they chose.18 George Curzon, fresh from his Indian mint, assured his audience in 1907 that ‘As the vacant spaces of the earth are filled up, the competition for the residue is temporarily more keen. Fortunately, the process is drawing towards a natural termination.’ By ‘fortunately’ he meant that the anarchy of international rivalries was about to be replaced by the international law of a few world powers,19 which he assumed was less anarchic. In 1910 Frederick Jackson Turner noted that the forces that had shaped America were disappearing, that colonisation and the advance of the frontier were coming to an end, and that a new ‘imperial republic’ had emerged.20
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