Editor's introduction: Reflections on Japanese and Turkish modernization and global history

Abstract

The trajectories of Japanese and Turkish modernization momentarily £ captivated the imagination of social scientists and historians during the 5 1960s as a testing ground for the analysis of the structural and institutional "* processes that went into the making of the modern in the world outside Europe and the US since the second half of the nineteenth century. The classic work on the subject is the volume edited by Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964), which was published as part of a Princeton University Press series on comparative modernization in Russia, Japan, India, Turkey and China. 1 A collection of articles by the foremost specialists in Japanese and Turkish Studies, the volume is representative of the kind of modernization theory prevalent in the American academy at the time. Despite its shortcomings, the volume remains a classic and a singular attempt that brought Japan and Turkey together within the field of modernization studies. Ward and Rustow construct their framework by defining modernization as a process distinct from westernization in terms of political and cultural changes of identity; they claim to disregard the differences of such politically divergent regimes as democracies, communist totalitarianisms and constitutional monarchies. Accordingly, modernization is defined in structural terms of industrialization, secularization, social mobility, science and technology, education, the shift from ascribed to achieved status, and a rise in material standards of living. These are concepts which still dominate our everyday understanding of modernity, despite strong criticism and suspicions in current academic discourse. In the 1960s, modernization was described in terms of increasing control over nature. 2 However, our current assessment of that process is probably better represented by the jaundiced view that humans have destroyed nature. In

The (Silk) Road Less Travelled: East Asian Studies and National Identity Formation in Modern Turkey

“…Esenbel (2006: 13) in the same analysis remarks that scholars in Turkey were heavily not involved in this global debate and that negatively affects the attempts to internationalize Turkish academia. The lack of engagement with the ciritques of Orientalism in Turkey is related to the practice of internalizing Western-centrism and orientalism and reproducing them against non-Westerners, which has been fed by the isolation of area studies in Turkey.…”

“…Selçuk Esenbel, in her comparative doctoral thesis on modernization processes in Turkey and Japan, and later in her compilation of debates that she brought together in the light of critiques of modernization theory, she conceptualized and categorized non-Western modernizations as Westernization, the rejection of the West and modernization through a merging of the local with the Western. Esenbel (2006: 16–17) also addressed theoretical and methodological problems in area studies:The possibility of productive comparative work has only clearly been shown on one topic through being a means of debating modernity. Area studies research dne in this way averts the “West and the rest” reductionism.…”