My take is that WWII otherwise than the European wars in 1866, 1870, 1914 was not anymore in expanding territory under the leading from one hegemonic country as indeed Napoleon did up to his defeat in 1815, but more at least in a clash of ideologies, accompagnied of course by the old demons of "nationalism".

Both in Japan and Germany, they acted not only for dominance of their surroundings, but also for the dominance as for instance the Japanese "Übermensch" above the other Asiatic populations and even with disdain to the white "Western" populations. And a German superiority percieved in the Nazist perception of the "Herrenvolk".

And that all against the defiant ideology of the Socialist and especially Communist doctrine of communality for each one the same or nearly the same on a progressive base and imposed by the state chosen by a majority of like minded Socialist citizens.

And in between I see the democratic countries led by a kind of Liberal-Socialist mixture as it was for instance in Belgium in the interwar period. A mix of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists, where there is a delicate balance between the Liberal-Democrats, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, where the liberal freedom is guaranteed but also the state subvented more egalitarian tendencies are represented.

In my opinion WWII was more about ideology than about rather real territorial expansion, and the afore mentioned democracies were taken between the two extremes of the Fascist and Communist opponents.

I started with this in my eyes biased right wing liberal article...
https://fee.org/articles/world-in-the-grip-of-an-idea-14-world-war-ii-the-bitter-fruit-of-ideology/
https://fee.org/people/clarence-b-carson/
When I did research for critics I only found this...even wikipedia about "fee" did not...
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/foundation-for-economic-education/

A rather more balanced approach I found in:
https://www.quora.com/Is-the-World-War-2-an-ideological-war
The answer of "Aaron Bianco"...

Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

My take is that WWII otherwise than the European wars in 1866, 1870, 1914 was not anymore in expanding territory under the leading from one hegemonic country as indeed Napoleon did up to his defeat in 1815, but more at least in a clash of ideologies, accompagnied of course by the old demons of "nationalism".

But the concept of Lebensraum ('living space') and the associated settler colonialism of sovereign European territories - although first popularized in the early years of the 20th century before WW1 - became a key policy of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Accordingly it was a major underlying reason for Germany's annexation of the Sudentenland, Czechoslovakia and Austria, and ultimately the invasion of Poland, France, the Low Countries, Norway and in particular, Russia. Surely the whole idea of the Fourth Reich was about aggressively expanding Germany's territory and for this 'empire' to be under central control and indeed one ruler, no?

The accompanying concepts of eugenics, aryanism, racism, untermenschen, and the practices of genocide and mass-deportation etc, were devised to try and ideologically legitimise this aggressive expansion to secure resources. However apart from the sheer horrific scale of the barbaric actions under the Nazis, I'm not sure that Germany's expansion of territory in the 1940s was really any more about an underlying ideology than was Napoleon's desire to create a pan-European republican empire supposedly based on 'enlightened' principles but nevertheless with France (and Napoleon himself) very much in control. Ultimately I still see both the Napoleonic War and WW2 primarily as wars of aggression to gain territory, control, security and resources, fought against states that felt threatened by these expansionist actions, ... but also in the case of the Napoleonic wars, those states/regimes that felt threatened by the French republican, revolutionary, anti-monarchist ideology.

Indeed I would suggest that actually a great many wars were fought for fundamentally ideological reasons. For example all the wars of religion, from the Crusades to the Protestant/Catholic wars of the 16th and 17th centuries; wars fought to gain independence from outside influence or control, whether that's the American War of Independence, the Chinese Opium Wars, or the various uprisings in South America against Spain or in the Balkans against the Ottoman Empire; plus almost by definition any civil war, whether fought in 1860s America or in 1640s England. Surely all these were essentially conflicts fought over differing ideologies, no?

I agree with you, MM, that as for instance when one looks at the religious wars, even in a modern context of the Jihad, it are in se also ideological wars, but I will try to point to the differences with the Nazi doctrine. And I think even the Japanese after the Americanised period of the Twenties (I made a thread about it overhere) and as winners in WWI as allies of the UK, were in the Thirties also going the Nazi way of the "superior" Japanese against the lesser peoples as even the Chinese and certainly the rest of the far East peoples and had as such also the right on their "Lebensraum" above the more degenerated countries.

My thoughts are perhaps best expressed by this BBC article from Jeremy Noakes;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/hitler_lebensraum_01.shtml
and addional also this one:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensraum

From the BBC article:

"During his period in Landsberg prison (where he had been incarcerated following the failure of his notorious Munich beer hall coup in November 1923), he read and discussed Ratzel's work and other geopolitical literature provided by a Munich Professor of Geography, Karl Haushofer, and fellow-prisoner Rudolf Hess.
Haushofer emphasised the 'extremely unfavourable situation of the Reich from the viewpoint of military geography' and Germany's limited resources of food and raw materials, and no doubt thus provided Hitler with an intellectual justification for his views. These were expressed in Mein Kampf, and remained fundamentally the same through the following years.
Indeed, an important reason for his decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 was his desire to acquire the Lebensraum that he had been seeking for Germany since 1925. He envisaged settling Germans as a master race in western Russia, while deporting most of the Russians to Siberia and using the remainder as slave labour."

It is just there in my opinion that the Nazi and perhaps also the Japanese expansion theorists differ from the religious wars. At least I think. 
They see expansion as a rather scientific based ratification of a "Volk" on a higher cultural and race level, that has the right to expand in surrounding countries of inferior people for the need of their vital requirements.

Although Friedrich Ratzel saw it also in the beginning as an old fashioned "colonialism"
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Friedrich_Ratzel
To highlight perhaps the theory of the "Lebensraum" in the inferior East, a much discussed "Haltbefehl" of Hitler at Dunkirk, as an ultimate attempt to make peace with the English, the Aryan "brother" "Volk". A Europe for the Germans and a naval world for Britain...
https://www.historynet.com/decisions-hitlers-halt-order.htm
Here the theory is denied, but I stopped reading a French historian after a discussion of more than 800 pages with historical data among others with the Hallifax connection, proving the above mentioned.

Just to say, MM, that the religious sectarians did not consider the infidels as inferior, but rather as potential converts or if they didn't want they had the self persuaded right to kill them.

The same perhaps for Napoleon, his expansionist dreams were not based on inferiority of the conquered people, on the contrary as for the Russians as he held them in high esteem.

Kind regards, Paul.

MM, perhaps further about the comparison of the two ideologies: Fascism and Socialism.

I had a long discussion on the Historum forum with an I guess American, who, as a bit the "FEE" article, tried to persuade me and others that Nazism was indeed National Socialism and thus indeed the same Socialism as their antagonists, but then only in a national frame.
I went a long way to explain to him even with Jstor articles if I remember it well, that the Fascist "corporatism" as started by Mussolini and taken over by the Nazis, was certainly no Socialism that was organized in horizontal classes, while the Fascist Corporatism was organized along vertical branches. Corporatism was organized by the state from above, while Socialism was organized from the base, first by the workers and the proletariat teached by such theoretici as a Lenin and it was only later that it became a dictatorship of the workers, themselves framed by ruthless leaders who had no pity even for their fellow comrades in their quest for might.

If you ar interested and if I have time I will seek the discussion back on Historum.

BTW. I discussed in the time in the frame of the factory with Americans. And they said to me, that for the average American (if that exists: an "average" American?), even the Liberal democrats are already Socialists in their eyes and our Socialists are Communists, not to say old fashioned Bolshevists.
I wonder what that average American thinks about the British Labour?...

Kind regards, Paul.

Aren't all wars ideological?

Whether the protagonists on both sides universally and genuinely believe they are prosecuting their respective ideologies through coordinated violence, or whether the organisers have simply attributed ideological cause to the violence that they want prosecuted for reasons more diverse and often even in direct contradiction of the very ideology espoused (by far the more common scenario), it seems that to get a large number of humans fighting in a sustained manner for a common cause requires at least a semblance of a cause to be constructed largely for them by their leaders, and by far the easiest and most effective way to achieve this is for the leaders to ground and phrase that cause in ideological terms.

Also, the dichotomy you draw between wars fought for reasons of territorial expansion and those fought on purely ideological grounds is a false one, I think. One almost unavoidable consequence of warfare is enforced redistribution of property (and a lot of destruction of property in the process). So much in fact is this a given that one could reasonably argue that at its deepest level the true motivation for warfare from the earliest days of the human race - and probably even further back in time - is exactly this. It might be ideology at its basest level, but then violence is also human interaction at its basest level too, so it would seem only fitting to acknowledge that this rudimentary ideology underlies all wars. Territory, food, mineral resources, water, and indeed any such basic definition of the most rudimentary and essential properties that societies need to subsist, lie at the very centre of the simple idea that they are worth fighting to obtain if a society lacks them or to retain when already in a society's possession. Being an idea then fighting over them is, by definition, an ideology, and in fact one that overrides whichever more nuanced or complicatedly expressed ideology the protagonists might really believe they are fighting for.

WWII is no exception. By no stretch of the imagination, nor any use of semantic somersaulting, could it ever be described - in any sense - as the "first ideological war".

nordmann wrote:

Also, the dichotomy you draw between wars fought for reasons of territorial expansion and those fought on purely ideological grounds is a false one, I think. One almost unavoidable consequence of warfare is enforced redistribution of property (and a lot of destruction of property in the process). So much in fact is this a given that one could reasonably argue that at its deepest level the true motivation for warfare from the earliest days of the human race - and probably even further back in time - is exactly this. It might be ideology at its basest level, but then violence is also human interaction at its basest level too, so it would seem only fitting to acknowledge that this rudimentary ideology underlies all wars. Territory, food, mineral resources, water, and indeed any such basic definition of the most rudimentary and essential properties that societies need to subsist, lie at the very centre of the simple idea that they are worth fighting to obtain if a society lacks them or to retain when already in a society's possession. Being an idea then fighting over them is, by definition, an ideology, and in fact one that overrides whichever more nuanced or complicatedly expressed ideology the protagonists might really believe they are fighting for.

You can be right nordmann that all wars have a motivation based on an idea, a kind of an ideological construction obtained or invented to serve the cause.

Now thinking along these lines, one can suppose that kings reigning by divine right, originally started as local chiefs and band leaders, having expanded their domain by marriage or by conquest and having made a pact with the religious leaders, who had already convinced their adherents about their ideology with the trick of the divine right, on their turn convinced their subjects that they were fighting in a war for a just cause, while it was in se just for the benefit of the occasional king of the moment. 
And convincing with such ceremonies of the laying on of hands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laying_on_of_hands
https://www.amazon.com/Royal-Touch-Monarchy-Miracles-England/dp/0880294086

Or a Napoleon, who, although it was an ordinary search for land grab and own personal might, was able to warm up the French for a kind of "ideology" of the greatness of France and of course for his person, and worth fighting for it. And for the dissidents to his policy he had always Fouché's secret police. A bit as MM mentioned...?

And MM can also be right when he mentions religion. I first was a bit sceptical about the Spanish conquistadores, fighting to expand the Catholic belief and to convert the infidels, but during reading over the years I got persuaded that they were indeed really convinced to fight also for that purpose and above the land grab for the King. And of course I agree that religion is also an ideology.

But nordmann, returning to WWII and perhaps later the Cold War, can't you agree that, at least a little bit  , above the normal land grab of conquest, it was more based on ideology of for instance Communism against the more property based societies' ideology, as first on the right side the ideology of Fascism and later on the Democratic side the market economy of Capitalism?

Kind regards, Paul.

World War II was sold initially on completely ideological grounds by respective countries to their populations. Britain for example, along with some other European countries facing German aggression, focused especially on combating fascism when selling the conflict to the public - though this enemy was also sometimes referred to as totalitarianism, a term that gained even more currency when Japan, less blatantly fascistic, entered the global conflict on the Axis side. German leaders, unlike their Italian allies who had coined the term and used it to rally patriotic support, initially played down their own description as fascist and concentrated less on classifying their enemies in ideological terms (having secured a non-aggression pact with a "Bolshevik" state, their number one ideological opponent as identified by the state during the Nazi rise to power) by placing more ideological emphasis on extolling the virtues of what they classed as "national socialism" within their own state. The Soviet Union, because of major strategic changes forced upon it by events, ended up siding with two "opposite" ideologies identified already as "enemies" of the state, though finally settled on an official policy for public consumption of distrusting capitalists while working with them, with all their ideological enmity focused on defeating fascism.

The Cold War period allowed the US to conveniently re-establish communism as an ideological enemy of the state, though it must be stressed that this aversion to that ideology bordering at times on paranoia was not entirely shared by all the allies it recruited to help achieve its aims, and nor was it ever imposed by the US on other "western" countries as a requirement to be considered an ally either. In Europe ideological opposition to communism was much more nuanced with often high degrees of tolerance encouraged among their publics, the emphasis being on curtailing a territorial spread of communism rather than the US hard-line ideology of "defeating" communism.

The Soviet Union maintained over this period a rather ambiguous and pragmatic approach to countering opposition to its own ideological position. While continuing to officially identify capitalism as a system to be distrusted and even eliminated over time, the country in its role as principal communist power and with a primary aim of securing itself from potential assault also worked closely with countries whose regimes exhibited many strands of ideological commitment, some of which even classed communism as a potential enemy of their own adopted systems.

I am not sure why you introduce the term democracy into the list at all. It is not an ideology per se, rather a facilitator of the prosecution of political ideology, and in fact many of the ideological varieties on both "sides" of the Cold War incorporated the concept to different degrees into their own systems as ultimate validation for the ideology those in power then prosecuted. There was certainly a lengthy war of words over who was "truly democratic" during those decades but while you may certainly distinguish between those who practised democracy and those who simply paid it lip service, you must acknowledge that the concept in every case was secondary to the main ideological aim of whichever state claimed it as a central plank of their respective system.

When it comes to land grabbing, or maybe better put as acquiring with force if necessary unhindered access to resources and markets outside of the state, then it is easy to see why capitalist states would be motivated to pursue this course. It is less easy to typify communist expansion on those grounds however - again because the main players (China entering the global picture a bit later on) both retained a huge focus on protecting the "motherland" from territorial invasion when pursuing foreign policy. This might disguise sometimes blatant acquisition of resources on their part too, but this was never sold to their own people on those terms, the ideological emphasis being always placed on preservation of communism first and foremost and the "liberation" of the proletariat in other lands from capitalist oppression in cases where the motherland's own ideology could be imposed on local populations. It is worth noting that in many instances of such expansion the term "democratic" was intentionally adopted by the new regimes within their countries' actual names, even more so than among those capitalist countries ostensibly "preserving" the principles of democracy within their own stated ideological aims.

Thank you nordmann for this fair and extended reply to my question. It covers all what I was intended to ask and I have no further comments unless to agree that the use of the "democratic" term has such a wide connotation that it is nearly worthless.

Kind regards, Paul.