Besides reflecting a generally (but not exclusively) younger generation than those in charge, it signifies advocacy of renewal or change, hence against "old": Mazzini's 1830s Young Italy seems the model, followed by Young Germany and Young Ireland. The Young Turks themselves followed in the wake of the Young Ottomans, an earlier reformist group involved in the first constitutionalist movement in the 1870s. All of them combined both national and internal aspirations - independence or unification, and some measure of internal political progress, in the Ottoman case the introduction of some measure of representative government (the same can't be said of the dreadfully reactionary Young England).