Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-29
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of what determines whether a society moves toward democratic governance or slides into authoritarian rule has occupied comparative political scientists for decades, yet it regains urgency in a period marked by democratic backsliding across the Global South, competitive authoritarianism in emerging economies, and mounting uncertainty about the durability of third-wave democracies. Indonesia, as the world's largest Muslim-majority nation and the third-largest democracy by population, occupies a particularly consequential position in this debate. Its political trajectory — from colonial subjugation to revolutionary nationalism, through prolonged military-backed authoritarianism under the New Order, and into the uncertain democratization of the post-Reformasi era — offers a rich empirical terrain for testing classical theories of political development. The invocation of Barrington Moore in this context is not merely academic homage; it signals a deliberate effort to return to structural, class-based explanations of regime formation at a moment when more agent-centric and proceduralist accounts have dominated the literature.
Barrington Moore Jr.'s foundational argument in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) holds that the character of agrarian capitalism — specifically, the nature of alliances forged between landed elites, the bourgeoisie, and peasant classes during moments of modernization — determines whether a society embarks on a democratic, fascist, or communist pathway. Moore's thesis rests on the comparative study of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India, largely bypassing Southeast Asia. Applying his framework to Indonesia therefore requires both theoretical extension and empirical adaptation. The Dutch colonial plantation economy fundamentally shaped Indonesian agrarian relations: it created a system in which indigenous landed elites were either subordinated to colonial capital or co-opted as administrative intermediaries, while smallholder peasant agriculture remained entrenched in Java alongside export-crop enclaves in the outer islands. Unlike the English case — where a commercially aggressive landed gentry aligned with urban merchants to push through parliamentary enclosures and eventually representative institutions — Indonesian colonial modernity produced neither an independent bourgeoisie nor a landed class with sufficient autonomy to broker democratic transitions from above. This structural inheritance would haunt Indonesian politics long after independence.
The New Order period under Suharto (1966–1998) illustrates the explanatory power of Moore's framework when applied with appropriate modification. The coalition that consolidated the authoritarian regime drew on the military as an organizational force, a technocratic bureaucracy dependent on state patronage, and a comprador business class — dominated by ethnic Chinese capital and politically tied to the palace — that lacked the autonomous institutional base to countervail state power. Indonesian peasants and agricultural laborers, meanwhile, were depoliticized through the corporatist architecture of Golkar and co-opted rural organizations, echoing Moore's observation that the suppression of genuine peasant political agency is a consistent feature of fascist pathways. What the Indonesian case adds to Moore's framework is the role of Cold War geopolitics and foreign aid architecture: the New Order's survival was substantially underwritten by Western ODA, World Bank lending, and American strategic interest in containing communist influence after the 1965 massacres. This externalization of developmental legitimacy allowed the Suharto regime to defer the domestic class bargaining that Moore identified as the engine of political transformation in the cases he examined. In this sense, the article's engagement with Moore illuminates not only Indonesian exceptionalism but the ways in which post-war international development finance has systematically distorted the class dynamics that Moore's model presupposes.
The Reformasi transition of 1998 and its aftermath present a more challenging object of analysis within a Moorean lens, and this is where scholarship of this kind makes its most valuable contribution. Indonesia's democratization was triggered not by a rising bourgeoisie asserting liberal claims against a feudal state, but by economic collapse, student mobilization, and elite defection from a regime that had lost its technocratic credibility. The subsequent institutional settlement — decentralization, competitive elections, a pluralist party system — produced formal democratic architecture without the underlying class reconfiguration that Moore associated with durable democratization. Indonesian oligarchs who accumulated wealth through New Order connections reconstituted themselves as democratic politicians; military factions adapted to electoral competition without fully accepting civilian supremacy; civil society organizations gained operating space but remained financially and organizationally fragile. The result is what scholars of comparative democratization have variously described as "oligarchic democracy," "electoral authoritarianism," or "low-quality democracy" — configurations that a strict Moorean reading would identify as unstable equilibria rather than consolidated democratic systems. Revisiting Moore's pathways framework in this context helps explain why Indonesia's democracy, despite institutional consolidation, has remained vulnerable to populist backsliding, dynastic politics, and the reassertion of military influence in civilian governance.
For researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of ODA policy, civil society strengthening, and democratic governance, the analytical trajectory implied by this article carries important programmatic implications. Development assistance frameworks that focus narrowly on electoral administration, anti-corruption mechanisms, or civil society capacity-building risk missing the structural determinants of regime stability that Moore's framework highlights. If durable democracy requires not only formal institutions but transformations in class power — specifically, the emergence of a bourgeoisie and a peasantry capable of acting as autonomous political agents rather than clients of state or oligarchic networks — then ODA strategies that reinforce state-centric development pathways may inadvertently reproduce the conditions for democratic fragility. Indonesia's current political moment, characterized by the consolidation of influence by President Prabowo Subianto and ongoing debates about civil-military relations, decentralization, and social protection, makes this structural reading more rather than less relevant. As Indonesia approaches the centenary of its national movement and deepens its regional leadership ambitions within ASEAN, the question of whether its democratic trajectory can be sustained without the class-political foundations that Moore identified as essential remains open — and urgently in need of the kind of long-durée, structurally informed analysis that this scholarly intervention represents.