ABSTRACT
The Second World War saw the cataclysmic culmination of a lethal blend: nationalism and militarism propelled the criminal ideologies of Germany, Italy, and Japan in a war of conquest and extermination. Most scholars depict militarism and nationalism as European creations sprung on the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Western empires and commercial networks expanded. The growth of the nation-state idea and the militarization of culture accelerated after 1763, when the modern world order took shape. During the French Revolution military force was an essential ingredient in the transition from bureaucratic absolutism of the ancien regime to popular sovereignty. During the revolution and under Napoleon Bonaparte, France experienced near perpetual war and the army became the embodiment of the nation. Historian Thomas Bender, though not considering militarism explicitly, notes that one could observe a global trend in the mid-nineteenth century: the development of national economies and centralization of the nation-state.
