Reaping what was sown: ontological insecurity and the far-right consequences of anti-communism in Turkish–German Cold War relations

Abstract This article explores how ontological insecurity shaped Cold War collaboration between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Turkey, and how their shared anti-communist anxiety produced lasting far-right consequences. Drawing on newly examined archival documents, it argues that communism was not merely a geopolitical or ideological threat but an existential danger to the state’s self in both countries. In response, the FRG and Turkey built a security partnership that extended into diaspora governance and intelligence coordination, often empowering far-right nationalist networks as bulwarks against leftist mobilization. These covert strategies – particularly the cultivation of far-right Turkish actors within Germany – were rationalized at the time as necessary countermeasures but ultimately contributed to long-term radicalization and blowback. By applying the framework of ontological security, the article reinterprets Cold War alliance dynamics as driven as much by existential anxieties as by strategic calculations. It concludes that contemporary German efforts to confront Turkish far-right extremism – such as the designation of the Grey Wolves as a security threat – risk obscuring this deeper legacy, producing a form of selective amnesia that externalizes a problem the FRG helped create.