Wilhelm also could be influenced by people its often suggested that reading Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power upon History" had a huge impact on Wilhelm. What if Wilhelm read Goltz's 'Das Volk in Waffen' / The Nation in Arms and ended up having a similar response? The book called for the total mobilization of a nation in time of war with the attitude that only fittest nation could survive a future general conflict. If Kaiser Bill gets obsessed with such ideas who better to carry them out than Goltz?
Michael
Willy had a hard-on for ships.
I think the Germans were well on their way to 'a nation in arms'. In the West the state is a means of ensuring law and order, an arrangement that allows civil society to re-produce itself, to allow commerce to flourish under the rule of law and where the political rights and obligations of an individual can be negotiated and ultimately guaranteed, and where the armed forces are under the ultimate control of legislature.
In Prussia-Germany the state existed over and above society. The individual's rights and obligations were always subordinate to the powers-that-be who were, in the Lutheran scheme of things, ordained by God and that the state was a spiritual entity, as the philosopher Hegel had taught, namely the hand of God on earth, under a monarch who was ‘God’s anointed one’ and as such it was anything but a mere cooperative association for the facilitating of commerce. Above all it was a warrior state. The government ruled the Empire according to the requirements of the army, and that is the true definition of militarism, namely the prioritisation of the perceived needs of the defence forces over all others. And further, just to underline the difference between imperial Germany and western powers at the time, there existed in the Reich a separate constitution for the army
Wehrverfassung. The essential feature of this arrangement was that the Empire was divided into military districts under the command of a general officer who was constitutionally controlled by an independent military cabinet that exercised the so-called
Kommandogewalt meaning that the military stood under no other authority than that of the Kaiser, the all highest himself. Only the administrative structure was subsumed under the authority of the regular bureaucracy. But what is crucial was the fact that the Kaiser in times of national emergency could decree that the Kommandogewalt of the army should assume responsibility for all normal government policies and actions. The civilian bureaucracy would have to submit to the ultimate authority of the army, SDP majority or not.
The British army generally did not see itself as the guardian of British institutions beyond the authority of Parliament. It was the servant, not the master. No one in the United Kingdom seems to have understood that in Germany the opposite was true. The German General Staff saw itself as the guardian of the state. The Kaiser himself, who thought he was the state, had been sidelined in 1908 after giving a notorious interview to a British newspaper. In 1914 the General Staff ruled Germany, a situation which became more obvious during the war.