“Nowadays, we are all ‘modern.’ But we became modern in very different ways” (Therborn 2012: 71). The implication here is that modernity is a global reality, based on different histories, and different social and cultural backgrounds. This also holds for Turkey; where interesting stories of (human) development and (social) progress gradually unraveled throughout the modernization process of the country. According to Therborn, there are four different paths to modernity defined by the conflict lines for and against the “new” based on whether the “new” is generated internally, or imposed from without (Therborn 2012: 56). He calls the first or original path to modernity “internal Europe,” the leading political and ideological force of which was the French Revolution and its ideological outcomes, i.e., nationalism, democracy, liberalism. No-one spoke about democratizing societies before the French Revolution (Therborn 2012: 57).

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