Anti-alcoholism, Turkish and American non-state actors, and their mutual pursuits of national and global sobriety

Abstract

In April 1920, few months after America’s implementation of Prohibition, several MPs of Turkey’s renegade Grand National Assembly in Ankara proposed a ban on the production, sale, import, and consumption of alcohol. Some MPs questioned the need to prohibit what Islam already forbade centuries earlier, but others stressed the medical, social, and moral imperatives for an injunction. After many contentious debates, the bill passed and remained law until 1924. This article adds to historical scholarship on the parliamentary passage of the ban through its interrogation of the American and Turkish non-state actors (NSAs) that worked towards this end. Following the passage of the US’s Eighteenth Amendment, leading Prohibition figures moved quickly to internationalize their agenda and created the World League Against Alcoholism in 1919. It became the principal American NSA to engage with Turkey’s emergent anti-alcohol interests; interests that coalesced into what became Yeşilay (the Green Crescent), which today is Turkey’s leading anti-addiction organization. Through analysis of American, Ottoman, and Turkish documents regarding both NSAs’ origins and various leading figures’ agendas, this study reveals the emergence of these relations while also identifying the plurality of agendas at play that exceeded simply mandating sobriety in lands of Ottoman and early republican Turkey.