Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at stable liberal democracy while others descend into authoritarianism — or oscillate uneasily between the two — has animated comparative politics for decades. It is a question that carries immediate practical weight at a moment when democratic backsliding has become a global phenomenon, when military-linked political elites are reasserting influence across Southeast Asia, and when international development institutions are being forced to reckon with the limits of procedural democratization as a development goal. Against this backdrop, a return to Barrington Moore's foundational framework in "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" (1966) is not merely an exercise in intellectual history. Applied to Indonesia — the world's third-largest democracy by population, a country that spent three decades under authoritarian military rule before undergoing a dramatic transition in 1998 — it offers a rigorous lens for understanding both the structural conditions that enabled democratization and the vulnerabilities that continue to haunt it. The article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia undertakes precisely this re-examination, and the stakes of its argument extend well beyond the Indonesian archipelago.
Moore's original thesis held that the balance of class forces — particularly the relationships among the landed aristocracy, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry — determined which of three political pathways a society would follow: liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. His formula, "no bourgeois, no democracy," suggested that a strong, independent commercial class was the indispensable driver of constitutional government, while peasant societies dominated by coercive agrarian elites were structurally predisposed toward authoritarian outcomes. Indonesia tests these propositions in interesting ways. Under Dutch colonial rule, the agrarian economy was organized around plantation agriculture — tobacco, sugar, rubber — that generated surplus for export without producing the kind of independent commercial bourgeoisie Moore identified in England. The colonial state suppressed indigenous capital formation, and the administrative class that emerged was deeply embedded in state patronage rather than market autonomy. When independence came in 1945, Indonesia inherited a class structure in which the actors Moore regarded as democracy's social carriers were conspicuously weak. This structural reality helps explain why Sukarno's parliamentary experiment of the 1950s proved unstable and why the slide into "Guided Democracy" and then full military authoritarianism followed a certain structural logic rather than being merely the product of individual will or foreign interference.
The New Order regime under Suharto, which lasted from 1966 to 1998, represents one of the most analytically rich case studies in developmental authoritarianism. Suharto demobilized the peasantry — especially after the annihilation of the PKI and its mass base in the 1965-66 killings, one of the twentieth century's worst episodes of political violence — and organized agriculture through corporatist rural institutions that channeled economic benefit while suppressing autonomous political organization. The commercial bourgeoisie that grew under the New Order was largely ethnic-Chinese business capital tied to presidential cronies, not an independent class with interests in rule of law and property rights protection against the state. TNI, the military, maintained its dwifungsi ("dual function") doctrine, which gave it formal roles in both security and civilian governance, embedding military interests throughout the bureaucracy and economy. Moore's framework would predict exactly this outcome: without a bourgeoisie capable of wresting constitutional concessions from the state, and with peasant mobilization crushed, the structural basis for democratic transition was thin. That Indonesia eventually democratized forces us to ask where the structural opening came from — and the answer, the article appears to suggest, lies precisely in the economic transformations produced by three decades of export-oriented industrialization, which did gradually generate new middle-class constituencies with interests divergent from the regime's.
The 1998 Reformasi transition, triggered by the Asian financial crisis, illustrates the interplay of structural preconditions and conjunctural shock that Moore's framework accommodates imperfectly but that its critics have long emphasized. A genuine, though incomplete, bourgeoisie had emerged under Suharto's late developmental phase: urban professionals, students, NGO activists, and segments of the business community who had developed organizational capacities and a normative stake in accountable governance. The financial crisis delegitimated the regime's core performance promise — stability and growth — while simultaneously revealing the extent to which crony capitalism had made the economy fragile. This conjunction allowed what Moore might call a "revolutionary break from above," pushed along by elite defection and mass street protest. The democratization that followed was real: competitive elections, civilian control (formally) over the military, a decentralized administrative structure, and a relatively free press all took root. Indonesia for a time became a reference case for analysts arguing that Muslim-majority societies were not structurally incompatible with liberal democracy. Yet the structural liabilities identified by Moore's framework did not disappear with formal institutional change. The military retained significant economic interests and informal political influence; oligarchic capital adapted rather than dissolved; and the rural periphery, never fully integrated into citizenship in the substantive sense, remained vulnerable to clientelism.
The current conjuncture makes this Moorean re-examination timely in the most direct sense. With Prabowo Subianto — a former military commander with a documented human rights record from the late Suharto period — now holding the presidency, scholars and practitioners are asking whether Indonesia faces democratic backsliding or a more fundamental reconsolidation of elite military-oligarchic power. The article's engagement with Moore is significant here because it moves the analysis beyond event-level political reporting toward structural explanation. If the social carriers of Indonesian democracy — the NGO sector, independent media, urban middle-class civil society — remain organizationally weak relative to state and oligarchic power, and if the agrarian and informal working-class majority remains structurally demobilized or captured by patronage, then the institutional forms of democracy may persist while their substantive content erodes. This is precisely the dynamic Moore's framework helps illuminate: formal political institutions are outcomes of underlying social power configurations, and without sustained shifts in those configurations, institutions alone are fragile.
For researchers and development practitioners working on governance, civil society, and ODA effectiveness, the policy implications are consequential. Donor frameworks that treat democracy as a binary condition — present or absent, measured through election quality metrics — will systematically miss the structural vulnerabilities that this kind of analysis exposes. Indonesia's experience suggests that the consolidation of democracy requires not only free and fair elections but the material strengthening of autonomous associational life, the development of a bourgeoisie genuinely independent of state patronage, and substantive incorporation of rural and informal-sector populations into citizenship. These are long-horizon, structurally demanding objectives that sit uncomfortably with typical ODA programming cycles and institutional risk frameworks. The broader regional context reinforces the point: Thailand's repeated military interventions, Myanmar's catastrophic coup, the erosion of democratic norms in the Philippines, and contested democratic quality in Cambodia all suggest that Southeast Asia is a region where the structural conditions Moore identified as foundational to durable democracy remain contested terrain. Revisiting Moore through Indonesia in 2026 is therefore not an academic retrospective but an analytical contribution with direct bearing on how scholars, policymakers, and civil society organizations understand what democracy requires — and what threatens it — in societies still navigating the long aftermath of colonial agrarian capitalism.