Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-28
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at democracy while others remain mired in authoritarian rule has animated comparative politics for decades, and few theoretical frameworks have proven as enduring or generative as that of Barrington Moore Jr. Published in 1966, Moore's "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" offered a sweeping structural account of political regime outcomes, rooting the divergence between democratic, fascist, and communist paths in the configurations of class power that attended the transition from agrarian to industrial economies. Sixty years on, this framework is being revisited and tested against the Indonesian case — a country that has traversed almost the full range of Moore's predicted trajectories, from parliamentary experimentation in the 1950s, through Guided Democracy under Sukarno, to the three-decade authoritarian consolidation of Suharto's New Order, and finally to the democratic transition of 1998 and its still-contested aftermath. At a moment when democratic backsliding has become a dominant concern across Southeast Asia and the Global South more broadly, returning to Moore through the lens of Indonesia is not merely an exercise in theoretical archaeology; it is an attempt to understand the structural conditions that make democratic governance possible or impossible, and whether those conditions have been met or merely simulated in one of the world's largest and most consequential democracies.
Moore's central argument rested on the fate of three class actors — the landed upper class, the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry — in navigating the economic and social ruptures of modernization. Where a powerful bourgeoisie emerged capable of checking royal or aristocratic power, parliamentary democracy tended to follow, as in Britain and France. Where the landed class allied with an industrializing state against both workers and peasants, fascism or right-wing authoritarianism resulted, as in Germany and Japan. Where peasant revolution proved the dominant force, communist regimes emerged, as in China and Russia. The analytical elegance of this schema has generated substantial scholarly debate over what it includes and what it systematically excludes — the role of geopolitics, colonialism, military institutions, and elite agency, among others. The article under review takes up precisely these tensions by asking how well Moore's tripartite class typology maps onto a country whose political development was deeply conditioned by Dutch colonial rule, post-independence elite fragmentation, and the particular institutional inheritance of the Indonesian military, the TNI.
Indonesia's colonial history is crucial to any Moorean analysis. Dutch colonialism did not simply extract agrarian surplus; it actively structured the social formations that would define post-independence politics. The cultivation system and the plantation economy created an agrarian class system profoundly different from those Moore studied, with a weak indigenous bourgeoisie, a rural population fragmented across thousands of islands and hundreds of ethnic communities, and a colonial state apparatus that subordinated indigenous elite formation to metropolitan economic interests. When independence came in 1945, the question of who would constitute the governing class was far from settled. The parliamentary period of the 1950s revealed deep conflicts between secular nationalists, Islamic political parties, regional power centers, and the communist PKI, whose rapid mobilization of peasant and labor constituencies represented precisely the kind of lower-class threat that Moore associated with revolutionary or at least destabilizing political outcomes. The 1965-1966 transition — involving the destruction of the PKI and the rise of Suharto — can be read, through a Moorean lens, as the violent suppression of a potential peasant-based revolutionary movement by a military-backed authoritarian coalition, an outcome that bears structural similarities to some of Moore's "reactionary" paths even if the class actors do not map perfectly.
The 1998 Reformasi transition poses the most interesting challenge to Moore's framework. It occurred not through the classic bourgeois revolutionary rupture that Moore associated with democratic outcomes, but through a combination of economic crisis, urban middle-class protest, and elite defection within the Suharto regime itself. This raises a significant question that has occupied scholars of Indonesian politics ever since: was the democratic opening of 1998 a structurally grounded transition, rooted in the maturation of new class forces capable of sustaining democratic governance over the long term, or was it a more contingent event whose democratic sustainability would depend on ongoing elite bargaining and the absence of economic shocks? The evidence since 1998 is mixed. Indonesia has conducted multiple peaceful elections, achieved civilian control over the military, and developed a reasonably pluralist media and civil society sector. Yet it has also witnessed the rise of oligarchic power, the use of blasphemy laws against religious minorities, and, most recently, political dynamics under the Prabowo administration that raise questions about the depth of democratic norms among the political elite. Moore's framework, updated and applied to Indonesia, suggests that formal democratic institutions alone are insufficient if the underlying class and institutional structures remain conducive to concentrated power.
The broader regional significance of this analysis cannot be overstated. Southeast Asia is currently experiencing what many scholars describe as a democratic recession, with authoritarian consolidation in Thailand and Myanmar, competitive authoritarian tendencies in the Philippines, and growing concerns about civil liberties across the region. Indonesia's trajectory matters not only for its 280 million citizens but as a bellwether for whether large, ethnically diverse, Muslim-majority societies can sustain democratic governance in a global environment increasingly hospitable to strongman politics. A Moorean analysis reminds us that democratic sustainability is not merely a function of institutional design or international pressure but of the underlying social and economic structures that determine whether broad social coalitions have both the interest and the capacity to defend democratic norms against elite closure. If Indonesian democracy is to consolidate rather than erode, the critical variables may well be the degree to which the rising urban middle class and organized labor develop independent political agency, and whether the agrarian and regional peripheries are incorporated into the political economy in ways that reduce the structural grievances that authoritarian populists exploit.
For researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of ODA, civil society, and democratic governance, the article's engagement with Moore points toward several important implications. Development assistance frameworks that focus narrowly on institutional metrics — election quality, judicial independence, press freedom indices — risk missing the deeper structural story that Moore's framework illuminates. International support for civil society organizations, labor rights, and inclusive agrarian development may, in the long run, do more to stabilize democratic outcomes than technical assistance to election commissions or constitutional courts, because it addresses the class-level conditions that Moore identified as the real determinants of regime sustainability. At the same time, the Indonesian case cautions against determinism: Moore's pathways are tendencies, not iron laws, and the contingent choices of political actors — the willingness of elite factions to accept democratic constraints, the capacity of civil society to articulate cross-class coalitions — continue to matter enormously. As Indonesia enters what may be a defining political period under a new administration with authoritarian instincts but democratic institutional constraints, Moore's framework, refracted through careful historical analysis, offers a sobering but productive lens for understanding what is structurally at stake.