Pulling an attaturk, possible countries?

I have many times seen threads asking about potential countries that could "pull a Meiji" meaning rapid modernisation of an underdeveloped non European/ Southern European country during the late 19th century.

I've become interested in the modernising reforms/secularisation/republicanism that mustafa Kemal brought to turkey in the wake of ww1 and the war of independance.

The question that I haven't seen discussed (correct me if I'm wrong) is whether in other countries there were candidates to do similar things a nationalistic militaristic moderniser, similar to attaturk or pilsudksi in Poland, which countries had the conditions/political figures to accomplish this?

Sorry if this is too vague.
 
Actually, there are quite a few examples of secularist, nationalist, modernizers in history, going back at least to Napoleon(I'm omitting the first-wave of the French Revolution because they kinda got sidetracked by their own carnage). The Mexican liberals from Benito Juarez and onwards into the PRI would be another example.
 
What I think is distinct about attaturk as a moderniser is seemingly going from an Ottoman Empire led by a caliph to being massively transformed seemingly by his force of will and I was wondering if there were other potential political/military leaders who aimed to/could do similar things in other underdeveloped countries.
 
What I think is distinct about attaturk as a moderniser is seemingly going from an Ottoman Empire led by a caliph to being massively transformed seemingly by his force of will and I was wondering if there were other potential political/military leaders who aimed to/could do similar things in other underdeveloped countries.

You should read Sukru Hanioglu's books on the Young Turks. Mustafa Kemal did not emerge ex nihilo. He was very much a product of the Ottoman Empire's later history. Your characterization of the Ottoman Empire going from caliphate to secular Republic due to the sheer will of Ataturk is a gross oversimplification. Had Ataturk died at Gallipoli there were plenty of Turkish generals to take his place. The Republic of Turkey might look a little different than OTL (no language reforms for example) but the general outline would be the same IMO.

As for other countries who could do something similar. The Mughal Empire comes to mind as a possibility, but they don't have the same need to be perceived as European that the Ottomans did. China and Korea too could have modernized earlier, but there too, the perceived "need to be European" is absent. The Ottoman case really was predicated on a number of things, the fact that it was the dominant European Power under Suleiman the Magnificent, the long history of shifting from colonizer to colonized / imperial decline*, and the European component of the Ottoman Identity with all the baggage that brought.

Albania needed someone like Ataturk in the early 20th century. King Zog tried to use this to justify his autocratic policies from 1925-1939. Ataturk, of course, mocked him incessantly for this. For Zog, reform was always something you threatened but never carried out. This attitude, coupled with pervasive corruption and rank incompetence prevented Albania from moving forward, enabled the Italians to economically colonize and then invade Albania, and empowered Hoxha and the Communist movement to take over following the Second World War.

*I know numerous Ottomanists dislike the narrative of *decline and have complicated it with their scholarship. That being said, I still think that "decline" still best characterizes Ottoman history in the 18th-20th centuries, albeit in a more complicated sense than traditionally thought.
 
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