Turkey – 100 Years of Longing for Modernity

Abstract

The text traces the painful development of Turkish modernity – a process of still ongoing clashes between the aspirations of a part of the elites to be “modern Europeans”, the unquestioning certainty of another part of them that “modernity” and “Europe/West” are by no means equivalent, and the traditional mentality of broad segments of Turkish society. At the heart of the study are two extremes: high literature (the works of Orhan Pamuk) and popular culture (television series), which reveals the wide register of possibilities for tracing the longing for modernity and its (un)realisation in Turkish reality. The original synonymy of “modernity” and “the West” that fueled the longing – from the late Ottoman Empire, through the Republican period until the end of the millennium – gradually disintegrated. In the new millennium, the official notion of achieved modernity increasingly asserted itself, however not as juxtaposition with the West, but in spite of it.