Can Turkey change the course of the story?

"Manifesting one's own identity and distinctness is an action of citizenship," epic German thinker Hannah Arendt famously said.

This applies also to states and people. Manifesting one's identity and distinctness is actually an action of universal citizenship and the hallmark of nation-states.

During my recent trip to Morocco, I had the chance to observe that the country has chosen to modernize by not disengaging its past but rather by, in Arendt's words, manifesting its distinctness.

Turkey, on the other hand, is incomparably ahead of Morocco in terms of its democratic credentials, economy and social life thanks to the revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920's that formed a new republic after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Yet in contrast to Morocco, Turkey has not been able to preserve its cultural uniqueness during its modernization process, since the revolution caused an immediate rupture with the past and traditions, in other words with the people's cultural background. 

According to Fuat Keyman, a prominent Turkish political scientist, Turkey's modernization is composed of four periods: Modernization, democratization, globalization and Europeanization. From 1923 on, the period of "modernization" formed a strong nation-state and a secular national identity. "Democratization" started in 1950 with the country's first elections, in other words with the multi-party system, and absorbed the principle of free elections and separation of powers.

The "globalization" process from 1980 on adopted the global market economy. Following that period, full membership negotiations with the EU, structural reforms and calls for human rights-based citizenship have been labelled "Europeanization."

Yet the whole process of...