Turkish Modernity: A Continuous Journey of Europeanisation

Abstract

From a classical perspective, modernity was understood as a linear and teleological process, spreading from the West to the rest of the world. Accordingly, all societies were said to undergo the same transformations, but at different periods in time. In the end, they would all be ‘modern’ in a western sense. In this frame of reference, modernisation was equated with westernisation, and as such, was very much visible in the narrative of Turkish modernisation. This belief also resulted in a subjective evaluation of the western type of civilisation as the superior model of civilisation, and the promotion of Euro-American hegemony in the discourse on modernity. It is exactly this Euro-American hegemony that is questioned in the context of contemporary discourses on modernity generated and discussed by Schmuel Eisenstadt (2000, 2005), Barrington Moore (1967), Gerard Delanty (2006), Johann Arnason (2006), Bo Strath (2010), Peter Wagner (2001), and Atsuko Ichijo and Willfried Spohn (2005). The ways in which such scholars debate modernity constitute a separate literature on the idea of multiple modernities. The idea of multiple modernities opposes classical views of modernisation and therefore denies the West its monopoly. Schmuel N. Eistenstadt admits that modernity, in its origins, was a western project which spread to the rest of the world through military and economic imperialism, especially in the form of colonialism, and comes to the conclusion that the West has never been successful in its promotion of a homogenising (cultural) program of modernity.