Militarism as Myth

Conventional historical accounts of militarism attribute its origins to Prussia, which is often considered militaristic virtually from its in cep - tion, characterised by highly nationalistic public education, universal conscription, and the isolation of the military elites from broader soci­ety (Posen 1993, 80-124).

There are two significant elements to this account of the origins of militarism. in terms of narrative, it functions less as a ‘policy’ myth than a myth in the classical sense, containing ‘heroes or villains, and discern­ible plot lines’ (Yanow 1992, 401). Militarism, or the pan-societal satura­tion of military values or glorification of war, is attributed to early Prussia which, given the presentist knowledge of the outbreak of WWI, is cast as a villain. The ‘spread’ of ‘Prussianism’ across Europe approximates a typical ‘fall from grace’ myth, as societies are presented as implicitly ‘corrupted’ by the institutional and normative pathologies that accompany militarism. As with policy myths, this construction of militarism, though it has an understanding of causality, does not engage as much in the language of logic or argumentation as it does in the assertive language of description, a structure not unlike narrative.

This highlights the second ‘mythic’ function of the academic milita­rism literature—its implication in the construction of militarism as a ‘real’ phenomenon. The majority of work on the origins of militarism is, unsur­prisingly, performed by historians (e.g. Berghahn 1984; Howard 1989, 2002, 2009; Vagts 1959). According to academic convention—an impor­tant regime of power/knowledge production—historians are considered to work inductively from empirical evidence to reach factually accurate classifications, thus benefitting from cultural epistemological assumptions as to what ‘counts’ as knowledge and how it should be acquired; the con­clusions drawn by historians (and social scientists) are commonly regarded as ‘truth’ (Milliken 1999, 236-7). In purporting to ‘describe’ or ‘study’ militarism, therefore, the academic community also participates in creat­ing it.

In doing so, the academic literature not only constructs militarism as a historic ‘truth’, but also as a form of social pathology. For instance, much of the literature is devoted to identifying the specific origins and nature of militarism. One group of scholars, such as McNeill (1984) and Posen (1993) considers militarism to derive from an array of institutional arrangements which enabled military ‘cliques’ to make policy decisions independent of political authorities and the ‘nation in arms’ policies of military organisation and mass recruitment (Bond 1998, 58, 65). Another school, in contrast, considers militarism to be a social and political phenom­enon, characterised by a ‘vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actors, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purposes’ (Vagts 1959, 13). This school highlights ‘ideational’ factors—such as the ability of democracy to create personal identification between ‘the people’ and the state (Howard 2009, 110-12)—as signifi­cant to militarism’s development.

The impression left by both schools is one of diagnosis.

Similar to the way in which the prison system—and its attendant aca­demic discipline of criminology—are understood to (re)produce the social category of ‘delinquency’ as a social pathology through a process of sci­entific labelling, study, and evaluation (Foucault 1995, 276-7; Edkins 1999, 50), the academic treatment of militarism presents it as a problem to be solved. In doing so, the academic construction of militarism sug­gests that it is ‘possible to supervise it’ and to channel the social pathology into ‘forms of illegality [or violence] that are less dangerous: maintained by pressures of control on the fringes of society’ (Foucault 1995, 278). Identifying militarism as a transgressive social practice thus renders it ame­nable to intervention and provides the impetus for isolation, mitigation, and/or control. The academic ‘creation’ of militarism thus renders a com­plex social phenomenon ‘knowable’ and, like crime, theoretically ame­nable to eradication.