The Struggle for Civilian Control in Bismarck's Germany
The Limits of the Military Profession Part 1: Prussia-Germany 1808-1871
“The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, not trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”
—Carl von Clausewitz1
German general and theorist Carl von Clausewitz died of cholera on November 16, 1831, leaving his magnum opus, Vom Kriege (“On War”), unfinished. His wife edited and published the manuscript the following year. While the work won some praise, it had little initial influence. “The first edition of 1500 copies was still not exhausted twenty years later when the publishers decided to issue a new one.”2 Following the period of reform that brought Clausewitz and his mentor Scharnhorst to influence, Prussian society—including the army—underwent a period of reaction. Traditional, technical rather than philosophical works were given emphasis in instruction at the war academy. On War began its history as a work much praised, but little read. Clausewitz only gained prominence after Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, victor of the German Wars of Unification, named On War as one of the five books that most influenced him and the official army histories of those war cited Clausewitz as the theoretical influence behind Moltke’s achievements.
Clausewitz is best known for his central claim that “war is a continuation of policy with the admixture of other means” which has laid the foundation for the fundamental debate in civil-military relations. Yet, it was this claim that was practically ignored by Moltke during the period that brought his works to prominence. Instead, the German Wars of Unification saw Prussia try to work out a theory of civil-military relations in real time with some success and failure.
(This post was co-authored by Secretary of Defense Rock, click the button below to check out his excellent posts on civil-military relations, particularly in the American historical context!)
Social Position of the Prussian Officer Corps
Samuel Huntington, the godfather of the study of American civil-military relations argued that origin of military profession started when the Prussian government issued a decree on August 8, 1808, that,
The only title to an officer's commission shall be in time of peace, education and professional knowledge; in time of war distinguished valor and perception. From the entire nation, therefore, all individuals who possess these qualities are eligible for the highest military posts. All previously existing class preference in the military establishment is abolished, and every man without regard to his origins, had equal duties and equal rights.3
This egalitarian sentiment of the Prussian Reform Movement was never truly fulfilled. Reactionary forces, wary of a democratized army (especially after the Revolutions of 1848), took measures to ensure aristocratic domination of the officer corps, particularly the higher ranks. For instance, Kadettenanstalten, military schools for the children of the impoverished nobility doubled in number from 1818 to 1839. The young aristocrat graduates of these schools would be granted a commission, regardless of the grade attained.4 This aristocratic dominance did not abate through the First World War.
In this way, Huntington’s “professionalism” of the Prussian officer corps is somewhat overstated but the principle of professionalism reinforced existing contempt for civilians. Officers did view themselves as the supreme authority on war and during it, but they also viewed themselves in a feudal-romantic vein, as “paladins” of the Hohenzollern crown.5 The position of the Prussian king as Oberste Kriegsherr (“supreme warlord”), created a direct personal relationship between him and the officer corps that both parties jealously guarded. The precise authority of the supreme warlord was never firmly established under the constitution. The result was an officer corps that owed allegiance to the crown rather than the state and viewed statesmen as amateurs in matters of war. The army understood its mission as not only to defeat enemies abroad, but to serve as a royalist bulwark against the tides of revolution. In the tradition of Frederick the Great, the monarch was expected to be roi connétable, capable of both leadership in war and statecraft, even long after the expansion of the state had made such personal rule impractical. The absence of a leader capable of shouldering this great responsibility left a vacuum in German strategic leadership and produced uncertainty in civil-military relations.6
This pseudo-feudal arrangement was alien to English, French, or American civil-military norms.7 In these countries, the army was answerable to a civilian war minister. There was no elected official in Prussia (or later in the German empire) that could claim authority over the military. Instead, an officer appointed by the crown headed the war ministry. The war minister was the only representative of the army answerable to parliament and so the army sought to strengthen its position by reducing his role. The role of the war minister came to be little more than asserting the privileges of the army and monarchy in the face of parliamentary questioning. The removal of responsibility from the war minister allowed him to plead ignorance —the Chief of the General Staff and military cabinet were not answerable to parliament, so the more responsibility that was transferred to those organization, the further the army slipped from legislative control.
There have been many civilian politicians that have been able to wrangle unruly military leadership, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Georges Clemenceau who famously quipped that, “war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.”8 However fewer civilians have been more dominant than Otto von Bismarck. Henry Kissinger observed of Bismarck that, “few statesmen have altered the history of their society so profoundly.”9 Indeed, he took a fledgling country wedged between great powers in northeast Europe to the most dominant land power in Europe in just a few decades.
The frequency in which Bismarck is pictured in both military and dress uniforms reflects both the militarization of Prussian society and his quasi civilian-military leadership role. Even though he had a dominant personality, he also affected the appearance of an officer, and so sought the respect of the senior staff. “I carry the heart of a Prussian officer in my breast,” Bismarck claimed, “and that is the best part of me.”10 His only military experience was compulsory service in the Prussian Army which was shortened to a year. As a result, despite his claims to military orthodoxy, Bismarck’s frequent wearing of the uniform of his honorary rank led to more scorn than acceptance from the officer corps. In their view, he was a civilian wearing a military uniform.
Even if the military didn’t like him, they respected his ability to shield them from the meddling of parliament. The king especially appreciated Bismarck’s abilities. This allowed Bismarck to be firm in his policy as he “refused to be bamboozled by technical military arguments.”11 He believed in the supremacy of politics, asserting that political goals, rather than military objectives, were the overriding intention of war. He wrote that,
The object of an army command is to destroy the enemy forces. The object of a war is to achieve peace under the conditions in accord with the country’s policies. Establishing and limiting the avowed war aims and counseling the sovereign in respect of those aims is always a political task, in wartime as during the preceding peace, and the manner in which this task is absolved cannot but exert an influence on the manner in which the war is waged.12
One might infer from reading this that Bismarck was a devoted student of Clausewitz, but in fact it was the opposite, as he claimed in 1899 that “to my shame I have to confess that I have never read Clausewitz.”13 His political philosophy became known as “realpolitik.” This was a pragmatic approach to European politics focused on practical objectives and power, rather than ideology or moral considerations. It emphasized national interest and the flexible use of diplomacy, military, and economic means to achieve goals. This flexibility differentiates Bismarck’s thinking from that of his successors. He avoided the formation of definite power blocs, keeping a “free hand” in his diplomacy.
At the same time, Bismarck understood Europe as a community of great powers. In practice, this meant undermining the formation of coalitions against Prussia’s rise by appealing to shared norms and rules, signaling constraint, framing its actions to prevent resistance, and securing its identity in international politics.14 Bismarck believed Prussia could only aggrandize itself to the extent that the other powers could live with. But this policy of moderation often flew in the face of German military doctrine that believed in “total victory.”
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was the principal military leader during the German wars of unification. He was Chief of the Prussian General Staff and Great General staff for nearly 30 years from 1857-1888. Moltke believed that war was far too serious and technical to be left under the influence of politicians, which, as one historian noted, “forced him into a virtually preprogrammed confrontation with the political leadership.”15 He summarized his views as such,
“Diplomacy avails itself of war to attain its ends, crucially influencing the beginning of a war and its end. It does the latter by reserving to itself the privilege of raising or lowering its demands in the course of the war. In the presence of such uncertainty, strategy has no choice but to strive for the highest goal attainable with the means given. The best way in which strategy can cooperate with diplomacy is by working solely for political ends but doing so with complete independence of action.”
“The course of war is predominantly governed by the military considerations, while the exploitation of military success or failure is in turn the province of diplomacy.”
In the conduct of military operations, “political elements merit consideration only to the extent they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible.”16
This is, of course, a complete departure from Clausewitz’s concept of the primacy of policy, despite superficial resemblance of his writing. Moltke asserts that war has its own logic which military professionals are uniquely equipped to understand contradicting Clausewitz’s belief that war has only “its own grammar, but not its own logic.” Moltke’s position asserted the sole right of the army to decision-making in times of war. What was or was not “militarily improper or impossible” was a matter for military professionals.
The German historian Gerhard Ritter argues that Moltke did not assert this prerogative out of ambition but out of a desire for technical exactitude. This in turn fostered a military culture in which, “the unexpected, the hazardous, and the risky, those aspects of warfare that Clausewitz had stressed, could best be eliminated as far as possible by elaborate and minute planning of all aspects of any possible future war.”17 This approach contributed to a rigid military mindset that prioritized meticulous planning over the unpredictability and fluidity of real conflict, distancing itself further from Clausewitz’s emphasis on the inherent chaos of war.
A second reason for Moltke’s fixation on delineating a clear area of responsibility was Bismarck’s strength of personality. Moltke—atypically of many officers—was not a forceful personality and acted as a broadly educated intellectual rather than from innate confidence. Bismarck’s political acumen was therefore a source of discomfort. Asserting the rights of the army was therefore seen by Moltke as a defensive effort, rather than an attempt to supplant Bismarck. While Moltke himself was atypical, he set the model for the classic military officer of the 19th century, assured in their superior technical knowledge and protective of interference in “their” sphere, this meant,
Focusing on the role of military means in ensuring the security of the state, he forgets that other means can also be used towards that end. For these reasons, the military professional tends to hold a simplified, zero-sum view of international politics and the nature of war, in which wars are seen as difficult to avoid and almost impossible to limit.18
This inevitable clash between the civilians and military came to a head after the battle of Königgrätz during the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. Moltke was eager to pursue and destroy the Austrian army, but Bismarck blocked this. While crushing the Austrian forces completely would undoubtedly strengthen Prussia’s military position, would such a “victory” be worth it? Prussia could secure all the political concessions it wanted without further risk. Humiliating Austria could have not only invited French or Russian intervention, but also sown the seeds of a future conflict, leading to the strategic dilemma of a “two-front” war—an issue that would haunt generations of German officers in the great wars of the 20th century.
Bismarck, appealing to the king’s distaste for war with a fellow German state (the war was called by some a bruderkrieg (“brother war”)), was able to negotiate a moderate peace. Prussia supplanted Austria as the leading German state while avoiding embittering Austria. Bismarck considered this a complete success, aggrandizing Prussia while preserving diplomatic flexibility. The army, however, viewed the peace as a betrayal of their victory.
The Franco-Prussian War
Had the war been prolonged for a few more weeks, it is difficult to see how either Bismarck or Moltke could have remained in posts which each felt the other was making untenable.
-Michael Howard, “The Franco Prussian War”
When war came again in 1870, this time against France, the army was doubly determined not to allow the diplomats to give away what they had won in the field. To this end, Bismarck was often uninvited to the council of war, unlike in 1866. Initially, Bismarck was unconcerned by this; the Prussian army had the clear objective of defeating the French in the field, something he felt did not require his input.
Yet, after the great victory in the Battle of Sedan which saw the French Emperor Napoleon III captured, Bismarck sought to open negotiations and found that the military was proving uncooperative in informing him of plans for a further campaign. It was not until six weeks after Sedan that the Chancellor’s office began to receive information in the form of copies of the same telegrams sent to the Berlin press. Even this half-measure was implemented only half-heartedly. Bismarck complained to Moltke that most of the time, he learned the contents of these telegrams at the same time they were published in the newspapers, a delay of five days.19
This was far from the end of the friction. Bismarck, eager to find a French government willing to make peace, sought negotiations with the army of Bazaine, besieged in the fortress of Metz. However, Moltke objected, arguing that negotiations with a besieged force were a military matter. Moltke and his circle were also open in their disagreement with Bismarck’s political assessment. They did not fear the intervention of other powers and objected to a Bonapartist restoration. Naturally, this interference enraged Bismarck, “It is exactly as if I gave a lecture about the placing of a battery in this or that place.”20 The army’s protectiveness of its area of authority was clearly not reciprocal. Ultimately, Bismarck’s efforts to negotiate with Napoleon III were doomed for other reasons, but the conflict pushed Prussian civil-military relations towards their nadir.
The war dragged on for another four months, culminating in a protracted and messy siege of Paris. During this, the rupture in civil-military relations still worsened as the occupation of France faced Prussia with the prospect of “almost conquering itself to death.”21 As historian Michael Howard writes, “The French request for an armistice was to come at an almost providential moment. Had the war been prolonged for a few more weeks, it is difficult to see how either Bismarck or Moltke could have remained in posts which each felt the other was making untenable.”22
Thus far, King Wilhelm had favored the military perspective in the prosecution of the war. In late January of 1871 he finally issued two orders in Bismarck’s favor, requiring Moltke to ask the king whether Bismarck was to be consulted before communicating with the French and to keep Bismarck informed of future operations, and to allow the Chancellor to express his views on them.23 The nature of these orders reveals the extent to which Bismarck had been frozen out of the prosecution of the war. It had required a direct royal order for him to be informed of campaign plans and be permitted to merely give his opinion.
Still more telling is Moltke’s immediate reaction to this development. The Chief of the General Staff was prepared to resign and drafted a letter sarcastically suggesting that Bismarck also be made Chief of the General Staff in the interests of unity. This acerbic memorandum was not sent, and a second, more moderate one was drafted and ultimately transmitted. In it, Moltke objected to informing the Chancellor of planned operations, declaring it a “breach of duty.” He included the following passage: “I believe that it would be a good thing to settle my relationship with the Federal Chancellor definitely. Up till now I have considered that the Chief of the General Staff (especially in war) and the Federal Chancellor are two equally warranted and mutually independent agencies under the direct command of Your Royal Majesty.”24 Wilhelm, newly crowned German Emperor, did not formally reply to the memorandum, though he did speak with Moltke. Wilhelm did not waver in his backing of Bismarck and Moltke, to his credit, immediately began coordinating with Bismarck as ordered.
It is clear from Moltke’s memorandum that the Prussian army understood itself as parallel to the civilian state rather than subordinate to it. In Moltke’s later writing, he makes clear what he considers the normative relationship: “at the moment of mobilization the political advisor should fall silent, and should take the lead again only when the Strategist has informed the King, after the complete defeat of the enemy, that his task has been fulfilled.”25 It is clear that Moltke understood the role of Chancellor not as captain of the ship of state (of which the military was part) but as the political advisor to the king, and therefore coequal to the king’s military advisor.
In effect, Moltke was not wrong when he described the Chancellor and General Staff as “independent agencies” under the command of the monarch. In the case of the Franco-Prussian War, the monarch ultimately favored the Chancellor, but this supremacy of the political institution over the military was purely by the king’s decision. The parallelism was unresolved, leaving questions of subordination to be decided by the monarch, as influenced by the personalities that surrounded him and without formal bodies of coordination.
In the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck was late in securing his supremacy, preventing him from securing the speedy peace he would have preferred. Bismarck was one of the great statesmen of modern international politics but even he struggled to develop a coherent civil-military relationship where the military viewed and operated independently of political oversight. The irony lay in “having doomed his society to a style of policy which could have only been carried on had a great man emerged in every generation” which was never certain.26 The stunning victory propelled the Prussian Officer Corps to a “demigod” status and now held “unquestioned authority and legitimacy” in German politics and society.27 The struggle during the Franco-Prussian War had been bitter and there was little chance of avoiding an angry France seeking revenge. Indeed, France set out in search of new alliances. After Bismarck’s fall, France came to partner with its longtime rival Great Britain and even Russia, a nation it had fought only a few decades earlier. The irony was that the coalition formed to check Germany that Bismarck had so feared came not out of military defeat, but military victory.
The Beginning of the “Political Doomsday Machine”
By the late 1880’s, both Bismarck and Moltke were reaching the end of their illustrious careers. Now, a younger generation of German nationalists and military officers were chomping at the bit to further expand Germany’s power and formed the engine of what some have called, “a political doomsday machine.”28 The militarists believed preemptive war was the uniform solution to the rising power of Germany’s neighbors. Likewise, success in the wars of unification had led nationalists to dream of a greater Germany “from Berlin to Baghdad.” Even in his late career, Bismarck had the experience and gravitas to stymie attempts to initiate a “preventative” war. For instance, in 1887, the senior military leadership cooked up a scheme to convince the Kaiser to declare war on Russia on a whim; they also encouraged Austria-Hungary to do the same. Bismarck stopped it before it became a crisis. But it was a bad omen and showed how the military leadership was increasingly out of control. This would eventually produce a civil-military relationship in which, “leaders subordinated political ends to military ends; considerations of war dominated considerations of politics.”29
Moltke himself had a strong relationship with Bismarck by this point, discussing war plans with the Chancellor. Moltke continued to hold his role as Chief of the General Staff until 1888, when he retired. His thinking in his late career had evolved beyond the axiomatic focus on total victory. The Battle of Sedan was as complete a victory as one could imagine, yet it had not ended the Franco-Prussian War. The ensuing experience of the Volkskrieg (“People’s War”) in France had disillusioned him to the idea of a short war. In 1890, in one of his final speeches in the Reichstag, he warned that the next conflict involving Germany could resemble another Seven Years’ War or Thirty Years’ War and that achieving decisive victory in modern warfare was becoming a near impossibility. Moltke now conceded the need for diplomacy to find a resolution after the army did what it could. “Total victory” was no longer the objective. Unfortunately, by then, the aged Field Marshal was isolated in his work on operational plans and studies. The General Staff had been educated in his original concepts and inculcated in the official histories of the wars of unification. Moltke’s genius, shown in the breadth of his thinking, was never absorbed by the institution.
Gerhard Ritter distinguishes Moltke from his successors for his lack of fatalism. While the Elder Moltke often pressed from preventative war, he made the argument from the military point of view, i.e. that war would be more advantageous now rather than later. Moltke was not overly disturbed when Bismarck quashed proposals of preventative war. In contrast to his successors, Moltke was confident in his ability to meet the challenges of war whenever it arrived. He did not view the political situation as intractable. If the statesman did not want to utilize an opportunity for easy victory in a preventative war, that was the business of the statesman. In other words, Moltke accepted Bismarck’s “right to be wrong.” A working relationship was therefore possible with the statesman’s who described his policy as “the most dangerous road last.”30
In the final years of their careers, both Bismarck and Moltke foresaw the dangers of a Germany where military prerogatives began to overshadow political ones. Bismarck, the architect of Germany’s rise, understood that the state’s survival hinged not just on military prowess but on the balancing of diplomatic relationships and restrained use of force. Moltke, though a staunch advocate of military autonomy, ultimately recognized the futility of unchecked military power in the context of modern warfare. Their eventual departures left a vacuum, filled by more aggressive military leaders, weak chancellors, and a feckless Kaiser. The political flexibility that had defined Germany’s rise came to be disregarded. As the officer corps grew more entrenched in its dominance, the military’s rigid and totalizing mindset contributed to Germany’s plunge into the most destructive conflicts in human history.
References
Busch, Moritz. 1899. Tagebluchblaetter. Leipzig.
Craig, Gordon. 1964. The Politics of the Prussian Army: 1640-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goddard, Stacie E. 2009. "When Right Makes Might: How Prussia Overturned the European Balance of Power." International Secuirty 33 (3) 110-142.
Howard, Michael. 2001. The Franco Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871. New York: Routledge.
Huntington, Samuel. 1957. The Soldier and the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kissinger, Henry. 1995. Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Kissinger, Henry. 1968. "The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck." Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 3, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership 888-924 .
Kitchen, Martin. 1979. "The Traditions of German Strategic Thought." The International History Review , Apr., 1979, Vol. 1, No. 2 163-190.
Lieber, Keir A. 2007. "The New History of World War I and What It Means for International Relations Theory." International Security 32 (2): 155-191.
Moltke, Helmuth von. 1871. Moltke’s Military Works: II. Activity as Chief of the Army General Staff in Peacetime (Second Part). Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn.
Paret, Carl von Clausewitz trans. Michael Howard and Peter. 1976. On War. Princeton: Princeton University.
Pflanze, Otto. 1963. Bismarck and the Development of Germany: The Period of Unification, 1815-1871 . Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ratcliffe, Edited by Susan. 2017. Oxford Essential Quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ritter, Gerhard. 1969. The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany (Vol. 1, 2). Miami: University of Miami Press.
Roth, Günter. 1992. "Field Marshal von Moltke the Elder His Importance Then and Now." Army History, No. 23 1-10.
Showalter, Dennis. 2000. "From Deterrence to Doomsday Machine: The German Way of War, 1890-1914." The Journal of Military History 64, no.3 679-710.
Snyder, Jack. 1984. "Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984 ." International Security 9 (1) 108-146.
Carl von Clausewitz, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, On War, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 88-89.
Michael Howard, “The Influence of Clausewitz,” in On War, Carl von Clausewitz, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 27.
Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1957), 30-31.
Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army: 1640-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 79.
For more details on military professionalism in Prussian society, see Huntington, 20-53.
Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, vol. 1, 4 vols. (University of Miami Press, 1969), 204.
See Ritter, Sword and Scepter, vol. 2 for a comparison of civil-military relations in the European powers prior to WWI.
From Oxford Essential Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017)
Henry Kissinger “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck.” Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 3, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (1968): 888.
Ritter, Sword and Scepter, vol. 1, 205.
Martin Kitchen. “The Traditions of German Strategic Thought.” The International History Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1979): 169.
Ritter, Sword and Scepter, vol. 1, 200.
Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany: The Period of Unification, 1815-1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 458, citing Lucius von Ballhausen, Bismarck-Erinnerungen (Stuttgart, 1921), 502.
Stacie E. Goddard “When Right Makes Might: How Prussia Overturned the European Balance of Power.” International Security 33 (3) (2009): 110-142.
Günter Roth, “Field Marshal von Moltke the Elder His Importance Then and Now.” Army History, No. 23 (1992): 5.
Ritter, Sword and Scepter, vol. 1, 195.
Kitchen, Traditions, 169.
Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984.” International Security 9 (1) (1984): 118.
Craig, Politics, 205.
Mortiz Busch, Tagebluchblaetter (Leipzig 1899), i. 298.
Dennis Showalter, “From Deterrence to Doomsday Machine: The German Way of War, 1890-1914,” The Journal of Military History 64, no. 3 (2000): 682.
Michael Howard, The Franco Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (New York: Routledge, 2001) 432.
Craig, Politics, 213.
Craig, Politics, 214.
Stadelmann, Moltke und der Staat, in “The Influence of Clausewitz,” in On War, Howard and Paret, 31.
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 136.
Snyder, Civil-Military Relations, 121.
Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary,” 168.
Keir A. Lieber, “The New History of World War I and What It Means for International Relations Theory.” International Security 32 (2) (2007): 161.
Ritter, Sword, 243.
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As we have seen in the multiple conflicts since the fall of the Soviet Union, conflict termination continues to require the closest coordination between the military and political leadership and this is only rarely achieved.