The notion of trust has recently gained strong currency within the debates on the politics of democratically governed societies. This has been very much connected with the drift of modernity to an increasingly unstable and uncertain era, whereby centrifugal forces have accomplished to push out centripetal forces more and more to the fringes of politics. In such contexts not only the so-called formal rationality as a practical guide to political action is repressed but also the sense of what the future may hold is practically lost. This situation has direct implications for the integrative aspect of democratic politics and the forms of cooperation and solidarity that citizens are inclined to get aligned and pursue. In the last decade in Turkey trust has become one of the decisive conditions for the political integration to take place within and across organized political actors. Nevertheless the form of trust that has become predominant does not appear to be the generalized or social trust any longer but, more and more, particularized or what we shall call community trust. Conceptualizing them as communities of trust, we argue that two major organized political forces have emerged, which are popularly dubbed as Islamists and Secularists. This political cleavage not only has dampened the potential for cooperation across citizens with different identities but also undermined the generalized social trust in formal political institutions. The latter has significantly weakened the conditions of democratic politics, leading to a situation in which the potency of democracy as an effective form of governance comes under critical scrutiny of political actors.
