Militarism
Militarism is the belief or the desire of a government or a people that a state should maintain a strong military capability and to use it aggressively to expand national interests and/or values. It may also imply the glorification of the military and of the ideals of a professional military class and the "predominance of the armed forces in the administration or policy of the state".
By nation
Germany
The roots of German militarism can be found in 18th- and 19th-century Prussia and the subsequent unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. However, Hans Rosenberg sees its origin already in the Teutonic Order and its colonization of Prussia during the late Middle Ages, when mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire were granted lands by the Order and gradually formed a new landed militarist Prussian nobility, from which the Junker nobility would later evolve.During the 17th-century reign of the "Great Elector" Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, Brandenburg-Prussia increased its military to 40,000 men and began an effective military administration overseen by the General War Commissariat. In order to bolster his power both in interior and foreign matters, so-called Soldatenkönig Frederick William I of Prussia started his large-scale military reforms in 1713, thus beginning the country's tradition of a high military budget by increasing the annual military spending to 73% of the entire annual budget of Prussia. By the time of his death in 1740, the Prussian Army had grown into a standing army of 83,000 men, one of the largest in Europe, at a time when the entire Prussian populace made up 2.5 million people. Prussian military writer Georg Henirich von Berenhorst would later write in hindsight that ever since the reign of the soldier king, Prussia always remained "not a country with an army, but an army with a country".
After Napoleon Bonaparte defeated Prussia in 1806, one of the conditions of peace was that Prussia should reduce its army to no more than 42,000 men. Since the time of Frederick The Great, however, Prussia practiced the Kruemper System, formed by dismissing a number of trained men at regular intervals and replacing them with raw recruits, thereby passing a large number of men through the ranks. The officers of the army were drawn almost entirely from among the land-owning nobility. The result was that there was gradually built up a large class of professional officers on the one hand, and a much larger class, the rank and file of the army, on the other. These enlisted men had become conditioned to obey implicitly all the commands of the officers, creating a class-based culture of deference.
This system led to several consequences. Since the officer class also furnished most of the officials for the civil administration of the country, the interests of the army came to be considered as identical to the interests of the country as a whole. In the 1900s militant monarchism was highly developed, garnering a fan-base in the United States of America. Wilhelm II had his palace guard dress in 37 different uniforms, including one that resampled the accessory worn by Frederick the Great. Wilhelm II appeared deluded about his physical disability, including his withered arm. He had sacked Otto von Bismarck in 1890 and obtained near absolute power but had to accept Erich Ludendorff as chief policy maker. Army general Ludendorff was appointed director of the Reich in 1917 and exercised the constitutional powers of Wilhelm II.
Militarism in Germany continued after World War I and the fall of the German monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, in spite of Allied attempts to crush German militarism by means of the Treaty of Versailles, as the Allies saw Prussian and German militarism as one of the major causes of the Great War. During the period of the Weimar Republic, the 1920 Kapp Putsch, an attempted coup d'état against the republican government, was launched by disaffected members of the armed forces. After this event, some of the more radical militarists and nationalists were submerged in grief and despair into the NSDAP party of Adolf Hitler, while more moderate elements of militarism declined and remained affiliated with the German National People's Party instead.
Throughout its entire 14-year existence, the Weimar Republic remained under threat of militaristic nationalism, as many Germans felt the Treaty of Versailles humiliated their militaristic culture. The Weimar years saw large-scale right-wing militarist and paramilitary mass organizations such as Der Stahlhelm as well as militias such as the Freikorps, which was banned in 1921. In the same year, the Reichswehr set up the Black Reichswehr, a secret reserve of trained soldiers networked within its units organised as "labour battalions" to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles' 100,000 man limit on the German army.; it was dissolved in 1923. Many members of the Freikorps and the Black Reichswehr went on to join the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary branch of the Nazi party. All of these were responsible for the political violence of so-called Feme murders and an overall atmosphere of lingering civil war during the Weimar period. During the Weimar era, mathematician and political writer Emil Julius Gumbel published in-depth analyses of the militarist paramilitary violence characterizing German public life as well as the state's lenient to sympathetic reaction to it if the violence was committed by the political right.
Nazi Germany was a strongly militarist state; after its defeat in 1945, militarism in German culture was dramatically reduced as a backlash against the Nazi period, and the Allied Control Council and later the Allied High Commission oversaw a program of attempted fundamental re-education of the German people at large in order to put a stop to German militarism once and for all.
The Federal Republic of Germany today maintains a large, modern military and has one of the highest defence budgets in the world; at 1.3 percent of Germany's GDP, it is, in 2019, similar in cash terms to those of the United Kingdom, France and Japan, at around US$50bn.
India
After India gained independence in 1947, tensions with neighbouring Pakistan over the Kashmir dispute and other issues led the Indian government to emphasize military preparedness. After the Sino-Indian War in 1962, India dramatically expanded its military which helped India win the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. India became the third Asian country in the world to possess nuclear weapons, culminating in the tests of 1998. The Kashmiri insurgency and recent events including the Kargil War against Pakistan, assured that the Indian government remained committed to military expansion. The disputed Jammu and Kashmir territory in India is regarded as one of the world’s most militarized places.In recent years, the Indian government has increased the military expenditure of the 1.4 million-strong military across all branches and embarked on a rapid modernization program.
Japan
In parallel with 20th-century German militarism, Japanese militarism began with a series of events by which the military gained prominence in dictating Japan's affairs. This was evident in 15th-century Japan's Sengoku period or Age of Warring States, where powerful samurai warlords played a significant role in Japanese politics. Japan's militarism is deeply rooted in the ancient samurai tradition, centuries before Japan's modernization. Even though a militarist philosophy was intrinsic to the shogunates, a nationalist style of militarism developed after the Meiji Restoration, which restored the Emperor to power and began the Empire of Japan. It is exemplified by the 1882 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, which called for all members of the armed forces to have an absolute personal loyalty to the Emperor.In the 20th century, two factors contributed both to the power of the military and chaos within its ranks. One was the "Military Ministers to be Active-Duty Officers Law", which required the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy to agree to the Ministry of Army position in the Cabinet. This essentially gave the military veto power over the formation of any Cabinet in the ostensibly parliamentary country. Another factor was gekokujō, or institutionalized disobedience by junior officers. It was not uncommon for radical junior officers to press their goals, to the extent of assassinating their seniors. In 1936, this phenomenon resulted in the February 26 Incident, in which junior officers attempted a coup d'état and killed leading members of the Japanese government. The rebellion enraged Emperor Hirohito and he ordered its suppression, which was successfully carried out by loyal members of the military.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression damaged Japan's economy and gave radical elements within the Japanese military the chance to realize their ambitions of conquering all of Asia. In 1931, the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden Incident, which sparked the Invasion of Manchuria and its transformation into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Six years later, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside Peking sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japanese troops streamed into China, conquering Peking, Shanghai, and the national capital of Nanking; the last conquest was followed by the Nanking Massacre. In 1940, Japan entered into an alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, two similarly militaristic states in Europe, and advanced out of China and into Southeast Asia. The following year, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor to prevent the intervention of the United States, which had banned oil sales to Japan in response to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the ensuing invasion of Indochina.
In 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, beginning the Occupation of Japan and the purging of all militarist influences from Japanese society and politics. In 1947, the new Constitution of Japan supplanted the Meiji Constitution as the fundamental law of the country, replacing the rule of the Emperor with parliamentary government. With this event, the Empire of Japan officially came to an end and the modern State of Japan was founded.