There is ample evidence that Hitler and other leading Nazis, indeed, expected the acts of aggression that made up much of their foreign policy to serve multiple ends conceived in terms of different parts of their ideo- logical program. Thus an attack on the "Jewish-Bolshevik" Soviet Union was, in part, a consequence of the anti-semitic, anti-communist, and anti- Slavic aims of Naziism.2 These aims alone, however, did not define for Hitler the total significance of invading Russia. His announcement that Germany sought "living space" in Russia indicates the presence in his program of a distinctly imperialist element. The Lebensraum element was a product of an extensive tradition in German imperialist ideology—a tradition related to other constituents of the Nazis' radical-conservative worldview but not defined by them. The Nazi program also contained expansionary goals derived from quite different traditions of German imperialist ideology.
The question of whether or not there were continuities between the expansionary aims of the Third Reich and the foreign policies of previous German regimes has attracted the attention of numerous historians. The question has arisen directly in studies of Nazi policymaking and implicitly in many analyses of politics and imperialism in the Kaiserreich. Several East German and Soviet scholars have attempted to demonstrate such continuities, representing them, indeed, as extending into what they call the neoimperialism of the present German Federal Republic.3 These at- tempts have been on the whole unsatisfactory, mainly because of the deficiencies of the Marxist-Leninist framework of analysis on which they have perforce been based. The "orthodox" Marxist-Leninist view is simultaneously too broad and too narrow: too broad because imperialism is defined as the entire political, social, and economic order of late capitalism, which means that any continuity at all in modern German history (outside the German Democratic Republic) is automatically a continuity of imperial- ism; too narrow because of its dogmatic and often distortive concentration on the organized structures of finance and industry as the prime motivators of policy. It is probably not, however, an accident that Marxist-Leninist historians have often led the way in suggesting connections between Nazi- ism and earlier German imperialism. Their framework of analysis, what- ever its deficiencies, has the virtue of providing a ready-made concept of underlying historical continuity that can be used to relate developments in imperialist policy to sequential steps in the evolution of German and inter- national capitalism. Successive German governments from Bismarck to Hitler are held to have followed expansionary policies in response to the demands of organized big business for assistance in solving the crises and contradictions that arose within industrial capitalism. Imperialist policies changed to some extent over time because the nature of those crises and contradictions changed, becoming generally worse. Inconsistencies between imperialist programs were the results of fissures within the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, fissures that were themselves products in the last analysis of the inherent contradictions in capitalism.
Most Western historians, including Marxist ones, have rejected the Marxist-Leninist approach because of its limitations. Nevertheless, a great many of them, especially those who emphasize domestic policies as the main determinant of foreign policy, have focused on similar types of social phenomena and similar power relationships. Some have con- structed explicitly neo-Marxist analyses on broader and more flexible foundations than Marxism-Lenininsm.4 The best-known of these ap- proaches, however, have concentrated instead on the concept of socio- economic modernization. The modernization approach has proven to be particularly fruitful in the study of imperialism in the Kaiserreich and its relationship to the coming of the First World War. It has not, however, been used effectively as yet to link Nazi imperialism to its Bismarckian and Wilhelmian predecessors, except by suggestion.
The modernization concept became a prominent feature of the postwar study of German imperialism with the attempts of Fritz Fischer and his students to demonstrate continuities between expansionary ideas current in government, political, and business circles in the decade or so before 1914 and the aims of the German government during the First World War itself.5 In depicting such continuities, Fischer attracted widespread attention by arguing that Germany had, in fact, started the war to achieve the goals developed by its elite before 1914. He implied also that the expansionary aims of the Nazis were to some extent continuations of these goals.
Although Fischer did not extensively use the term modernization and concentrated on a rather limited range of economic changes as the under- lying forces behind Wilhelmian imperialism, the essence of the modernization approach was present in his analysis. According to Fischer, the course of Germany's rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century created severe problems for the various German elite classes. For the leaders of finance and industry, modernization led to a need to invest outside the boundaries of the Reich in competition with foreign (especially British and French) business. Germany was, however, perpetually short of capital because of previous heavy demands of rapid industrialisation. In the years before the First World War, German financial institutions found that they could not protect their enterprises abroad when they were threatened with foreign takeover. German business therefore turned to the government, formulating different versions of a program of external expansion to secure and enhance investment. This program was trans- mitted to Bethmann Hollweg's government and to other sectors of the elite through a network of personal and institutional connections. During the war, the same network functioned to create a series of discrete war aims that became, in essence, the policy of the Reich government.
Fischer's students and the large number of historians influenced by his work have extended the approach that he pioneered, noting, for example, the importance of a growing community of interest between segments of the industrial and the Junker agrarian elites in the face of the perceived threat from socialism in the years just before World War I. This community of interest served to enhance the ability of the business elite to affect policy, but it also meant that the interests of the Junkers had to be incorporated into war-aims discussions. Historians of the Fischer school have also taken into account an increasingly wide range of political fac- tors that influenced Wilhelmian imperialist policy.6 Whatever the specific interests at work, however, the conscious motives leading to imperialism are represented as stemming directly from the process of economic mo- dernization. The resulting expansionary program is regarded as essen- tially uniform—a product of elite consensus in which disagreements ap- peared only on matters of detail. Germany was to create an organized system through which her economic domination of central Europe would be assured. She was to annex European territories with industrial and mining capacities or lands that were needed for strategic reasons. Germany was also to expand her overseas empire, especially through the establishment of a single German colony that included most of central Africa. These aims, frustrated by the result of the First World War, were, so it is argued, essentially those of the Hitler regime as well.
Critics of Fischer have found a great many problems with his analysis, especially with his extremely narrow conception of the policymaking process and of the reasons that elite interest groups turned to imperialism.7 His students, by extending the scope of the analysis, have avoided some of this criticism. But the assumption of the entire Fischer school that German expansionary aims, and thus German imperialism, were basically uniform is not borne out by a close examination of the very statements of those aims that they cite. We shall see presently that before and during the First World War there were at least two different aggregations of imperialist ideas current in German politics. These aggregations over- lapped to a considerable extent but were contradictory in many funda- mental ways—and they were perceived at the time as contradictory. We shall see further that German imperialism in the Wilhelmian era, far from being the product of elite consensus, was rather the result of attempts to create consensus—attempts that failed, at least up to the time of the Nazis.
The Fischer school shares with most other historians of the subject not only the assumption of the fundamental uniformity of German imperial- ism, but also a particular notion of the nature of the evidence for the continuity of imperialism: the recurring use of a certain vocabulary to denote expansionary ideas. For example, most segments of German imperialist opinion during World War I advocated the establishment of a German-dominated economic union in central Europe. All used Friedrich Naumann's catchword for the idea: Mitteleuropa. The Nazis also included Mitteleuropa in their catalogue of national policy aims as early as the mid 1920s, and Hitler sought central European integration (together with a great many other things) during World War II. Is this continuity? In a sense, yes (as we shall see), but not as the concept of continuity is used in most of the literature on German imperialism, including that of Fischer and his followers. On closer examination, it becomes clear that more than one version of the Mitteleuropa idea existed and that the imperialists using the term during the First World War meant quite different things by it. The Nazis, in fact, attempted in their version of Mitteleuropa to tie together the earlier highly contradictory views of economic integration. This is a complex concept of continuity that involves consideration of the interaction between political ideology and the structure of politics over time, which the Fischer style of analysis does not permit.
The idea that modernization was the ultimate source of continuity in the history of German imperialism has been employed most explicitly by historians who focus on the phenomenon of "social imperialism," espe- cially Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Wehler and the rest of the social imperialist school argue that Bismarckian and Wilhelmian imperialism were prima- rily political responses by threatened elites to the domestic class conflict generated by German industrialization. According to Wehler, Bismarck briefly adopted colonialism in the 1880s because he believed that it would permit him to consolidate bourgeois and worker support behind his re- gime, which Wehler interprets as standing ultimately for continued autoc- racy and semifeudal Junker rule.8 The reason that such an instrument of cooptation was available was that colonialism had previously emerged among certain segments of the upper bourgeoisie. German business leaders faced with the post-1873 depression used the demand for colonial expansion as the opening wedge of a campaign to acquire government support for market expansion abroad. Also, the concepts of colonialism and aggressive market expansion provided the business elite with a poten- tial weapon against social democracy: such policies could secure German industry against downturns in the business cycle and thus protect workers' jobs and incomes. Revolutionary socialism, even trade unionism, could not promise the workers so much. According to Wehler, Bismarck turned to colonialism not because of his belief in its inherent validity but because of his desire to use it in the politics of class conflict. The proponents of the social imperialist explanation argue that much the same thing was true of the later history of German imperialism, from the era of Weltpolitik to that of Hitler. According to some interpretations along these lines, Ger- many was led into the First World War by elite groups that sought to use wartime conditions to maintain the loyalty of subordinate social classes.9
The social imperialist approach has also been heavily criticized on a number of grounds, most notably because evidence to support it, al- though available, tends to be somewhat scarce. In Germany as elsewhere, people who advocated imperial expansion pointed to the potential utility of imperialism in deflecting class antagonisms. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to demonstrate that such considerations weighed more heavily in the minds of imperialists than did many other factors. Wehler and his followers have also been accused of not taking into account other sources of imperialist motivation, especially those arising from the operation of the system of international relations, in order to exaggerate the importance of social imperialist motives.10 These are not fatal flaws in the social imperialist approach, however. They merely show that the phenomenon in question—imperialism in the industrial age—contained more complexi- ties than the rather broadly denned categories of Wehler's model can accommodate. A great deal of the social imperialist analysis can be readily employed in explanatory frameworks that take other factors into account.
From the standpoint of the present study, the deficiencies of the social imperialist approach lie in rather different directions. Indeed, most of the attempts to explain imperialism as a direct consequence of modernization suffer from the same difficulties. In the first place, there is a strong presumption that imperialism as a set of ideas and distinctive political actions was a result of the aims of a small number of segments of the social elite. These groups wished to achieve relatively clear and straightforward economic ends; at the same time, they wanted to maintain their elite status against potential rivals and against the industrial proletariat. Although much of the politics and ideology of any country revolve around such aims, elite classes are not, in fact, the only participants in the political process, nor is it at all clear that broad social-class categories are the most meaning- ful ones for defining political action. Geoff Eley's analysis of the politics of the German Navy League, one of the most important imperialist pressure groups in Wilhelmian Germany, has demonstrated the complexities of imperialist politics and the variety of the groups involved.11 Eley has also shown that the creation and use of ideologies in imperialist politics were not the exclusive prerogative of clearly identified elite classes; important elements of navalist politics reflected the resentment of various middle- class groups against the very elites that were supposed, in many of the social imperialist analyses of Wilhelmian imperialism, to have invented navalism as a means of rallying the support of the bourgeoisie.
Connected to this problem with social imperialism is the one that has already been noted in the discussion of Fischer's modernization argument: the Wehlerians, like Fischer, take an essentially unitary view of German imperialism. This has caused Wehler and some of his followers, for example, to downplay the importance in the German colonial movement of the argument that Germany needed settlement colonies to solve the problem of emigration. In fact, the settlement idea played an extremely important role in German imperialism, a role that is not easily explained by the Wehlerian model. The multiplicity of those who used the idea of imperialism in German politics is matched by the multiplicity of German imperialist ideologies. The social imperialist framework of analysis does not readily explain this phenomenon. We shall argue that social imperialism as Wehler describes it, rather than being the dominant form of imperialist ideology in Germany or even a particular imperialist ideology in itself, was actually a component of practically all varieties of imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including ones that were overtly opposed to each other. Social imperialism was, in other words, one of a number of idea-sets that could be tied together in various ways to make up a composite imperialist ideology—a process about which we shall have more to say shortly.
As with most of the approaches to the history of German imperialism that concentrate on the immediate social effects of modernization, it has proven difficult to apply the Wehlerian analysis of social imperialism to Nazi expansion. The evidence of apparent similarities in expansionary vocabulary and ideas is there, but the logic of the social imperialist argument requires that these continuities be matched with some form of continuity in the response of threatened elite groups to modernization. This, in turn, requires that the Nazis be accorded essentially the same status as Bismarck and the other defenders of the nineteenth-century social order or, at least, that they be portrayed as the willing instruments of capital- ism. Although some have ascribed Hitler's acceptance of colonialism to pressure placed on him by the capitalist interests that supposedly stood behind the German colonial movement, the whole idea of the Nazis as the front men for a threatened capitalism is difficult to maintain in the face of the considerable evidence that exists about the revolutionary character of Nazi aims. Unless one can postulate a strong, uniform Nazi connection to elite social interests, it is extremely hard to demonstrate a continuity between the different eras of German imperialism on the basis of the standard social imperialist argument.
These difficulties illustrate what is probably, from the standpoint of the subject of this study, the greatest weakness of most of the explanations of German imperialism that portray it as a series of immediate responses to modernization. By assuming the primacy of direct connections between the socioeconomic processes of modernization on the one hand and political action on the other, such explanations oversimplify the workings of politics and the effects of the politics of one period on its successors. There are, indeed, ways of showing the kinds of continuity that the Wehlerians assume, but it requires a substantial broadening of their approach to politics to do so. It requires, in fact, the explicit recognition of a political sphere of human social existence that acts as, among other things, an intermediary between direct perceptions of socioeconomic change and specific instances of political action and that links those perceptions to one another. Moreover, an appropriate structure of explanation that connects modernization to political phenomena such as imperial- ism must also account for the fact that things other than responses to modernization also influence politics.
Before we turn to the problem of creating such a structure of explana- tion, we must also note that not all attempts to link Nazi expansionary and foreign policies to those of preceding governments have focused on modernization. Much of the discussion has taken place in the context of more-or-less traditional political and intellectual history. Historians of Nazi foreign policy such as Hildebrand, Weinberg, and Rich have concentrated on the evolution of Nazi policy ideas from the 1920s onward through the interaction of the Nazis' thinking and the pressures of exter- nal political reality.14 We shall consider these approaches in the final chapter. For the most part, however, they postulate a relationship with previous German imperialism based on an apparent continuity in stated expansionary aims or, in the case of Hildebrand's analysis, a continuity founded on the existence of a limited set of policy alternatives available to German governments from Bismarck's time onward. According to the latter view, Hitler, like his predecessors in World War I, chose an extravagant imperialist alternative as opposed to the more pacific (and effective) one chosen by Stresemann. In none of these approaches, however, is the nature of pre-Nazi imperialism closely examined nor is a comprehensive explanation of continuity or discontinuity given in terms of the structures of German politics and society.
Only a few historical works have focused on ideological aspects of imperialism in Germany. This is unfortunate because ideology is crucial to an understanding of the relationship between imperialism and the social and political systems, the motives of imperialists, and, especially, the question of continuity. If continuities exist between the politics of one era and those of the next, they must necessarily involve the adoption of similar patterns of thinking about politics. Obviously, each generation is to some degree socialized with the political attitudes and values of its forebears. People, whether policymakers or more casual political participants, cannot help but work within the intellectual frameworks they inherit, even though they may substantially modify those frameworks to suit their peculiar circumstances. At a certain basic level, any examina- tion of continuities in German imperialism must involve a consideration of political ideas organized into apparently coherent structures, or ideolo- gies. The evidence for continuity that is most often cited—the repetition in one period of imperialist formulas from a previous one—is essentially ideological evidence.
Neither the Marxists nor the Wehler and Fischer schools ignore ideol- ogy, but they take a rather limited view of it: ideology is one of the mean; by which a group of political participants, usually a social class or organized interest group, represents its own interests in politics both to itself and to other people. On the whole, ideology is held to derive from the particular socioeconomic and political environment in which the group finds itself at any time. This brings one back to the problem of explaining the intellectual aspect of continuity between periods in cases in which the environment of politics has changed.
Historians such as Fleinz Gollwitzer and Wolfgang Mommsen take a different approach, one in which some of the standard assumptions of intellectual history are directed toward politics and ideology. Ideas are considered to be the products of an intellectualizing sphere of human activity in which intellectuals, formalizing their own attitudes in systematic statements, develop social concepts that arc then adopted by political actors to define the objects that the latter seek.15 This approach, however, does not give an entirely satisfactory account of the relationship between politics and ideology, especially over time. Standard intellectual history, with its relatively narrow conception of the causal link between ideas and action, finds it difficult to deal with the complex interplay among formal ideas, individuals' perceptions of social reality, and the immediate problems faced by political practitioners. Thus, for example, Gollwitzer discusses "social Darwinism" and the concepts of "world- political thinking" as real intellectual phenomena that affect the behaviour of policymakers without sufficiently considering the specific circumstances that led politicians to adopt or (more importantly) to modify these pheno- mena over time to correspond to perceived political needs. Some sort of framework of explanation is required to relate the imperialist ideas Goll- witzer has described to the factors of politics and socioeconomic change that are the prime concerns of most historians of imperialism.
In reaction to the explanatory limitations of much of the contemporary historical literature on German imperialism, there have been a number of recent attempts to take a comprehensive view of the phenomenon with- out adhering to any particular theoretical line. The most impressive of these is Paul M. Kennedy's study of the development of the antagonism between Britain and Germany that existed before 1914.16 Kennedy at- tempts to examine all aspects of the Anglo-German relationship before 1914, weighing the claims of domestic politics, social change, economic rivalry, and diplomacy to being the prime sources of the impending con- flict. In the course of his study, Kennedy says much of importance about the relationship between German imperialism and politics. His work helps to break down the artificial (and by now largely deleterious) distinction made in German historiography between analyses of policy based on domestic politics and analyses that emphasize diplomacy. He demonstrates convincingly that, although a great many complex domestic political forces affected the actions of German (and British) policymakers, most policymakers also genuinely responded to their perceptions of the imperatives of foreign politics as significant considerations in themselves. Kennedy does not, however, tell us much about some of the major concerns of the present study—especially the relationship between the politics of the Wilhelmian period and those of the Nazi era.
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