Naval professionalism and the state in turn-of-the-century Germany and America

This article explores the political claims and practices of naval professionalism in Germany and the United States at the turn of the century. This exploration is set in the context of how to write German history after the breakdown of the classic narrative of German exceptionalism. The paper argues against a simplistic presentation of Germany as the "militaristic other" to Western democracies and political modernity by showing the parallelism of American and German naval officers as protagonists of an Expertenmilitarismus-a militarism of experts. These officers pursued comparable domestic agendas predicated on the creation of an autonomous politico-institutional space beyond any serious civilian control. This quest was rooted in the professionalism of naval military experts who invented navalism and pursued their own interests in state and society. Calling for full control over their own professional projects in the name of expertise and science, naval officers made claims similar to those of the multiplying bodies of experts in Germany and America. The particular articulation of the professional militarism varied from country to country, according to distinct national institutional, political, and intellectual environments. Because the German navy already enjoyed substantial independence from civil society and parliamentary politics, German naval officers were particularly aggressive and far-reaching in their quest to eliminate all the remaining points of outside dependency.