Anti-Americanism as a Default Ideology of Opposition: Turkey as a Case Study

Contemporary anti-Americanism is as much based upon a backlash against globalization and an antithesis to the values generated and exported by American culture as on specific episodes of contention between the US and another collective actor, altering the nature of their relationship in the long run by determining the subsequent behavior of the politically dominant actors as they remain engraved in collective memory. On the basis of this assumption and following an overview on anti-Americanism as a phenomenon, this essay analyzes the recurrent anti-Americanism in Turkey, identifying its external and internal sources—that is, episodes of contention and other factors such as ideology, nationalism and the role of the media—as well as its consequences, before replacing it within the typology elaborated by Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane on various anti-Americanisms.