Prussia's soldier king spent most of his budget on the army
Frederick William I of Prussia, nicknamed the Soldier King, launched sweeping military reforms in 1713 and pushed army spending to 73 percent of the state's annual budget. When he died in 1740, a country of just 2.5 million people supported a standing army of 83,000, among the largest in Europe.
Militarism is the conviction that a state should keep powerful armed forces and use them aggressively to advance its interests, often glorifying soldiers and letting the military dominate government. Germany's version is usually traced to Prussia. The historian Hans Rosenberg finds its seeds even earlier, in the Teutonic Order's medieval colonisation, when mercenaries granted land became a warrior nobility that later produced the Junkers. In the 17th century the Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg, raised his forces to 40,000 and built an effective war administration.
After Napoleon crushed Prussia in 1806, the peace terms capped its army at 42,000. Prussia had already been cycling trained men out and fresh recruits in, which pushed large numbers through the ranks and kept a trained reserve. Officers came almost entirely from the landed nobility, who also staffed the civil service, so the army's interests came to be treated as the nation's own, and rank-and-file soldiers were schooled in unquestioning obedience. Kaiser Wilhelm II dressed his palace guard in 37 different uniforms, dismissed Otto von Bismarck in 1890, and by 1917 had to let General Erich Ludendorff direct policy.
The Allies blamed Prussian militarism for the First World War and tried to curb it through the Treaty of Versailles, which limited the army to 100,000 men. Many Germans felt humiliated. Disaffected soldiers launched the Kapp Putsch against the Weimar Republic in 1920, and the army secretly trained extra reserves in so-called labour battalions until 1923. Many veterans of these networks later joined the Nazi party's paramilitary wing. After Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, the occupying powers ran a programme of re-education meant to end German militarism for good.
Japan followed a parallel path. Rooted in samurai tradition and the warlords of the Sengoku period, a nationalist militarism took shape after the Meiji Restoration, captured in the 1882 Imperial Rescript demanding soldiers' absolute personal loyalty to the emperor.
Source: Militarism
