Morris states that a cult of personality (with an ideology, ‘Kemalism’, to match) has built up around the country's founder who he accuses Atatürk of establishing something close to a dictatorship as he pushed through a personal revolution of widespread reforms against the will of the uncomprehending majority that left the Turkish Armed Forces as the main defenders of an incomplete model with autocratic tendencies and democratic flaws but recent reforms to the 1982 constitution, written under military supervision following a bloody coup, mark a key turning point in the country's delicate balance of power with foot dragging bureaucrats rather than the generals now being the main opposition to democratisation.

Morris states that pressure from the EU and a public backlash against the authority's heavy-handed counter-insurgency against the violent Kurdish national liberation movement of the Kurdistan Workers' Party has resulted in the “world's largest nation without a state” receiving cultural rights in education and broadcasting, but, despite events such as the release of Kurdish politician Leyla Zana and her colleagues and the lifting of a 28-year ban on their language, their future is still far from secure and renewed violence after a five-year unilateral ceasefire that followed the 1999 trial of the movement's ruthless and opportunistic founder Abdullah Öcalan would soon commence.

Morris reports on pressure from both the EU and Turkish grassroots organisations, such as Flying Broom, that has resulted in reforms to the civil and penal codes for a range of human rights issues including attitudes to torture and extrajudicial execution, prison reform following controversial ‘death fasts’ by the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party–Front, legal protection for women and children in a country where polygamy is accepted and ‘honour’ killings are still a reality, and a more inclusive approach to the communities affected by the massive Southeastern Anatolia Project, but he concludes it will take a long time for the new thinking to percolate through the system.

Morris recalls the economic crisis precipitated by the February 19, 2001, falling out between Prime Minister Ecevit and President Sezer that swept Tayyip Erdoğan to power in the 2002 election with a series of economic reforms based on a deal Turkish economist Kemal Derviş had agreed with the International Monetary Fund, including public spending cuts, increased foreign investment and the introduction of the new Turkish lira (worth one million old lira), that put an end to the cosy alliance of politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who had carved up the spoils of the old boom and bust cycle between them for decades in a country where corruption is endemic.

Morris travels to Germany to contrast the modern success stories of Şahinler founder Kemal Şahin, MEP Cem Özdemir, Head-On director Fatih Akın and footballers Ümit Davala and Tayfun Korkut with the original generation of Gastarbeiter who failed to integrate and examine how Turkey directs this group to lobby for EU accession via the Presidency of Religious Affairs funded Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) but faces competition from more extremist elements such as Milli Görüş and Metin Kaplan’s Caliphate State which cause the likes of French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to question multicultural Europe.

Morris explores Turkey's hybrid media system which combines state-control with restrictions such as Law 5816 “crimes against Atatürk” and article 301 “public denigration of Turkishness” with a new openness that has seen divergence and dissent flourish from conservative morality tales to Big Brother style reality shows on TV, taboo busting films such as Derviş Zaim’s Somersault in a Coffin and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak, and great works of literature such as Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and Ahmet Altan’s A Place Inside Us, the best of which are introducing European audiences to modern Turkish identity.