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What's your explanation for WWI, then? The autocratic Russian and Austro-Hungarian states embarrassed themselves repeatedly, and on the Western Front, Germany wasn't all that different to France or Britain. A theory of liberal military weakness, and presumably autocratic strength, would seem to suggest that autocracy ought to correlate with positive military performance. But that seems more like the opposite of what we see in WWI.
Again, we look at a map. The British empire: Canada, India, half of Africa, Australia. The French Empire: the other half of Africa. America! Russia! Gigantic global empires - plus Italy, Romania and Japan.
The German Empire? 2 tiny scraps of land in Africa and Papua New Guinea. The Austro-Hungarian empire? Small, poor and disorganized. The Ottomans? Mid-sized, poor and disorganized, the sick man of Europe.
Germany had no rubber, little iron, not enough food, they had to choose between fertiliser and explosives.
Germany was massively overperforming, fighting three huge empires to a standstill and knocking Russia out of the war while France and Britain underperformed considering their size and access to world markets. But it was a totally stacked war where most of the strong powers were on one side.
(Italy had universal male suffrage since 1912, it was arguably more democratic than Britain in WW1 but their military performance was horrendous).
My theory is not that autocracy correlates to positive military performance but that liberal countries have inferior military performance considering the size and resources of the powers involved. Autocracies have a huge range from astonishing capacity to horrendous. But liberal states are regularly subpar.
I'd argue that by the standards of 1914, Germany was a relatively liberal power.
I'm actually not all that convinced that the deck was as stacked as you think - it's a mistake to just look at a map and assume that the amount of colour on the map is directly proportional to military power. Germany didn't have a huge colonial empire, but it was a large, rapidly industrialising European power with a lot of human capital, which had also militarily embarrassed France relatively recently in the 1870s. I don't look at French West Africa and therefore assume that metropolitan France should have had an insurmountable military advantage over Germany, its larger and more populous neighbour, with access to the same technological base.
But at any rate, let's grant that Germany overperformed in WWI and WWII. Is that enough to conclude that liberal states militarily underperform? That seems like a lot to generalise fron a single example, particularly considering that WWI Germany arguably was a liberal state, and that illiberal states (Austria, Russia, the Ottomans) also put in noticeably poor showings. If we grant that Britain and France underperformed, that seems less like liberal states being weaker, and more like... well, everybody underperforming relative to Germany. Maybe Germany just had really good fundamentals, or lucked into a few military geniuses and associated reforms, or something else. My point is that the pattern doesn't seem to be "liberal weak, illiberal/autocratic strong". At best the pattern is "Germany strong".
That is, however, a single example, and I am wary of drawing strong conclusions from single examples. For instance, if we go back a century (plus a half, if you're counting from WWII), we find Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which was undoubtedly the most liberal country in Europe by a massive margin, and their decades-long overperformance. If you were generalising from the period 1790-1810 or so, where France took on pretty much the entire rest of Europe and kicked them around one by one, you might be tempted to conclude that liberalism is a kind of cheat code to military supremacy.
I'm just not seeing a strong general correlation between a liberal constitution and military underperformance.
Particularly when military-industrial investments and the quality of the opposition's decision making is factored in.
If you show a map of a large part of the world and small part of the world, but the small part of the world invests more in the most relevant military technologies that can be brought to bear than the large part, you should expect to see to see the smaller part of the world out-perform and out-compete the larger parts, and to continue to do so until industrial outmatch leads to disparities that can overcome advantageous positions (like, say, being able to launch history's largest naval invasion to overcome the moat that is the English Channel).
It turns out, military-industrial economics don't work like in video games, where you pay money to buy a formation whole-cloth. You actually need to, you know, build the relevant assembly lines beforehand... emphasis on before. And a significant part of the WW2 opening military dynamic was that the western europeans were much later to invest in military expansion.
That, in turn, was driven by the rest of the world's assessments of what a good german leader would do. German headstart mobilization was tolerated / not matched up to a point in no small part because the western europeans and soviets alike thought Germany would have to be very stupid to begin a warmongering campaign against the western empires who economically outsized them on the west, and particularly with the the soviets who outsized them on the east. It would be a particularly bad leader who, even with the early military investments, would try to take one or the other, let alone both.
Which was correct! It was very stupid of the Germans to begin a warmongering campaign. That was an accurate understanding of the situation, because even with its unexpectedly high initial performance advantages the Germans did ultimately fail and fall. The unexpected success in topping- which was unexpected on both ends and hardly a reasonable expectation- did not, in fact, enable Germany to beat the Soviets in turn, even when the Soviets took several non-necessary policy errors like 'purge the Red Army right before a war' and 'ignore strategic warning intelligence.' Even with major unexpected failures on the part of the allies, and gambles that even the Nazis acknowledged were gambles, the Nazis still lost. The pre-war expectations- that the Germans would have to be stupid to try such things- was validated.
It just didn't mean that the hyper-authoritarian Germans wouldn't do stupid stuff that got their own country conquered in the process. Hitler was a romantic-nihilist, and that is not exactly commonly understood even now, let alone back then.
Which, in turn, throws another wrench in the 'liberalism is incompetent, authoritarianism is based' premise. The authoritarian lost, and lost badly, and lost for reasons broadly known beforehand. The western liberal incompetence along the way, in turn, were generally either 'this emerging aspect of technology was not recognized across the world'- in other words, not a general competence failure- or failures to believe the authoritarian would be that stupid by gambling on high risks... which, of course, is treated as a validation of the authoritarian.
The former is hindsight bias of believing what is known afterwards should have been obvious at the time, and the later is just the military variant of 'jokes on you, I was just pretending to be retarded.'
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Germany massively outperformed everyone else on land for the first 3 1/2-4 years of war; Austria did badly but by Austrian historical standards actually pretty well.
The German empire fought France and Britain to a draw, alone, and defeated Russia while carrying Austria on its back. The balance of resources, population, and geography was against the central powers, same reason the confederacy lost the civil war.
Certainly Germany did very well in WWI, but Germany was also the most liberal of the Central Powers. Austria and the Ottomans both gave middling to poor performances, and on the Entente side, it was the most autocratic power, Russia, that performed worst. This strikes me as a data point against any reactionary theory that autocracies are more militarily capable than liberal states.
Depending on how you count them, you might also count the Russian Revolution and the Turkish war of independence - while neither set of revolutionaries were a liberal dream, both seemed to perform much better on the battlefield than the autocracies they overthrew.
Austria was probably more liberal in practice, at least in the sense of tolerating diversity, even granted that Germany had more liberal government structures.
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If anything, WWI is probably the reason why liberal countries struggled at first in WWII, because they generally did not want to be forced into another mega-war at first, AIUI.
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Indeed, one can argue perhaps that liberal democratic states can be more dangerous in warfare than autocracies:
Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 13 May 1901
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1901/may/13/army-organisation#column_1572 (I still find the record keeping involved in this incredible)
Not related entirely to the point at hand, but two things strike me from this:
As you say, the record-keeping required to have exact meeting minutes of a session nearly 125 years old available at the touch of a button is amazing.
Churchill was always an incredible speaker. The way he excoriates some of his fellows is incredible - "Indeed, if the capacity of a War Minister may be measured in any way by the amount of money he can obtain from his colleagues for military purposes, the right hon. Gentleman will most certainly go down to history as the greatest War Minister this country has ever had." He speaks only once, at the very end of this meeting, and after he's done it adjourns. He'd been an MP for all of three months.
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