Military-Industrial Interactions in and Between Germany and the United States: Combining Spatial and Timescales

The classical nomothetic social sciences of economics, political science, and sociology have reduced the complexities of societal development not the least by abstracting from time and space. To understand these complexities better, it is recommended to study interacting processes of political-economic development, technological change, and changes in life support systems in characteristic times. Repeated and increasingly sophisticated warfare, deepening economic crises, and externalized ecological costs have all their own timescales. It is examined, therefore, in the context of Western industrial development, how the interactions of advanced industrialization and militarization have unfolded on different timescales in the trajectory of two main powers. In the case of Prussia-Germany, precapitalist militaristic mentality was modernized to catch up with other great European powers. The United States of America modernized warfare in a Civil War of contesting modes of production in Westward expansion. At a multiple characteristic timescale (MTS), these formerly dispersed developments on two continents converged, finally, into a Thirty-One Year War between science and technology-based rivals. The fatal mistake of a failing peace arrangement after the First World War prompted the backlash of the inter-war years. After the Second World War, it was replaced by a more robust peace arrangement with more comprehensive normative agreements regarding political economy as well as peacekeeping under the umbrella of the United Nations. However, a stepwise and protracted US decline from its 1945 top of hegemony finally replaced hegemony by violence-based domination. Since the end of the Cold War and of the “short twentieth century” (E. Hobsbawm, Age of extremes. The short 20th century 1914–1991. Michael Joseph/Viking Penguin, 1994) with its moment of hope for a peace dividend with developmental potentials unilateral power politics have again come to the fore and feed geopolitics with war dividends. The resulting world-systemic chaos with its erratic fluctuations also implies bifurcations: It may become possible to reject the history of industrialized warfare and by the way of emancipatory foreign politics to strengthen and synchronize an alternative, peaceful road formerly not taken. To achieve and maintain this solution, the problem of its repeated elimination must be understood from its industrial capitalist roots in the expanding modern world-system.