Object or subject? The paradox of "youth" in Turkey.

A columnist in a Turkish newspaper recently asked : « Will nothing really be the same again ? » [Kaplanoglu, 1999: 6] referring to the impact of the earthquake of August 17, 1999, on the Turkish psyche. The writer Murathan Mungan [1994] used a similar metaphor earlier in what seems today like a prophetic statement : « I think Turkey has really come to lean against the wall. There is nowhere to go ; either the wall will crumble or it will be dismantled. If it crumbles, we will be crushed below, if it is dismantled maybe we will move to another space – or at least try to. » The earthquake is an apt metaphor for the large-scale dislocation of Turkish society at the wake of the millennium. This dislocation stems from the attempt to construct a single national identity upon the body of a multireligious, multiethnic, multilingual empire. The main instrument in this civilizational process, based on a localized version of Enlightenment ideas, was educated youth 1. Recent studies have emphasized the historical and cultural variability of experiences of modernity outside the Euro-American context. These studies indicate that Western modernity itself constitutes a culture located in time and space, rather than a universal paradigm. This suggests that there is not one, but