For this, however, a nation needs weapons. The acquisition of soil is always linked with the employment of force.

If the task of politics is the execution of a Folk’s struggle for existence, and if the struggle for existence of a Folk in the last analysis consists of safeguarding the necessary amount of space for nourishing a specific population, and if this whole process is a question of the employment of a Folk’s strength, the following concluding definitions result therefrom:

Politics is the art of carrying out a Folk’s struggle for its Earthly existence.

Foreign policy is the art of safeguarding the momentary, necessary living space, in quantity and quality, for a Folk.

Domestic policy is the art of preserving the necessary employment of force for this in the form of its race value and numbers

Chapter 3

RACE AND WILL IN THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER

Here at this point I want to discuss that bourgeois concept which views power chiefly as a nation’s supply of weapons, and, to a lesser degree, perhaps also the army as an organisation. If the concept of these people were pertinent, that is, if the power of a nation really lay in its possession of arms and in its army as such, then a nation which has lost its army and weapons through any reasons whatsoever must be done for permanently.

These bourgeois politicians themselves hardly believe that. By their very doubt of this they admit that weapons and army organisation are things which can be replaced; and that consequently they are not of a primary character, that there is something which stands above them, and which at least is also the source of their power.