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British politicians often argued that Britain maintained its navy only in order to secure its own survival by keeping sea communications open, while Germany in no real need of a powerful navy, threatened this legitimate British policy-goal by pursuing expansionist politics. German leaders, emboldened and a little dazzled by the tremendous industrial and economic success of the newly unified Reich, held that Britain was maintaining its economic dominance in the Empire by military means and thus blocking the progress Germany hoped to make in its aspiration to parity status and economic prosperity, with all that that entailed. This paper will explore the underlying rationale of the arms race between Britain and Germany shining through in those different positions on legitimate (military) policy aims. It will go beyond the visible symbols, as it were, of the Dreadnought and the Two-Power standard. These very concrete matters will also be dealt with here but, more importantly, this essay is meant to give some answer as to whether an archetypal differentiation between survival on the one hand and domination on the other can be made out as the predominant logic that led the two countries to embark on the road to the Great War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]