A Short History of Anti-Americanism and Terrorism: The Turkish Case

Abstract

Throughout the past century, anti-Americanism crescendoed and then subsided in rough proportion to the global power projected by the United States. In Turkey, anti-American protests reached a new level of intensity in the late 1960s when U.S. actions challenged Turkey's sovereignty. While subtle acts of resistance came from the military and other government officials, most protests came from ideologically motivated leftists who clashed with equally dogmatic ultranationalists and Islamists. The ensuing battles resulted in the most prolonged era of terrorist violence in modern Turkish history. Thus, anti-Americanism in Turkey can serve as an instructive case study. In this essay I conclude that anti-Americanism stemmed from Turkish efforts to preserve sovereignty as well as from the ideological commitments of the Turkish Left. Terrorism, the political use of violence to provoke fear, was a different matter. It was reactionary and ethnocentric, concerned with internal conflicts and policies as well as transnational ones. In view of its deep roots and its lethality, some observers suggest that terrorism's causes are irrelevant: Political violence need only be dealt with through punitive legal action. In contrast, in this essay I argue that U.S.-Turkish relations formed part of the context in which terrorism arose and that the history of those relations thus provides cautionary lessons on the sources of anti-Americanism and the terrorism with which it is sometimes associated.