Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-15
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies consolidate democratic governance while others slide toward authoritarianism remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. Barrington Moore Jr.'s foundational 1966 work, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," offered a structural answer rooted in agrarian class relations, arguing that the character of alliances among landlords, commercial bourgeoisie, and peasantry shaped the long-run political destinies of nations. More than half a century later, the Indonesian case — marked by colonial extraction, authoritarian consolidation under Suharto's New Order, and a dramatic but increasingly contested democratic transition after 1998 — offers a particularly rich test bed for Moore's framework. This new contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when Indonesia's democratic trajectory has become a matter of genuine international concern, as observers document an erosion of civil liberties, elite capture of electoral institutions, and the resurgence of military-affiliated figures in civilian governance. The article's effort to re-read Indonesia through Moore's analytical lens is therefore not merely an exercise in historical sociology but an urgent intervention in ongoing debates about the structural determinants of democratic durability.
Moore's central argument was deceptively simple in its logic yet sweeping in its ambition. He contended that the transition to modernity produced three broad political outcomes — liberal democracy, fascism, and communist revolution — and that which path a society followed depended heavily on how agrarian elites responded to commercialization and whether the bourgeoisie forged independent political identities capable of challenging landed oligarchies. The famous formulation, "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," encapsulated the idea that democratic governance required a class with autonomous economic interests powerful enough to extract constitutional concessions from the crown or its equivalent. Scholars working on the global South quickly identified the limitations of this framework: many post-colonial societies lacked the kind of robust landed aristocracy or industrial bourgeoisie Moore had in mind, and the role of colonialism in restructuring class relations in ways that had no European analogue was insufficiently theorized. Indonesia exemplifies these complications acutely. The Dutch colonial economy fostered a highly segmented social structure — ethnic Chinese commercial intermediaries, Javanese priyayi administrative elites, and a vast smallholder and plantation workforce — that did not map cleanly onto Moore's European archetypes. Understanding whether Moore's pathways remain analytically useful for Indonesia therefore requires significant conceptual retooling, and the article under discussion appears to take this challenge seriously.
Indonesia's postcolonial political history reads, in broad strokes, as a sequence of regime transformations that resist easy classification under any single theoretical model. Sukarno's "Guided Democracy" of the late 1950s represented a deliberate retreat from parliamentary pluralism in the name of national unity and anti-imperialism, drawing on a populist coalition that bridged nationalist, Islamic, and communist currents. The catastrophic collapse of that experiment in 1965-66, amid mass violence that killed hundreds of thousands of suspected communists and their affiliates, installed Suharto's military-backed New Order — a regime that combined developmental authoritarianism with systematic repression of civil society. Moore's framework would suggest examining the class coalitions that sustained the New Order: the military as an institutional actor with deep economic interests, a technocratic elite integrated into international capital flows, and an agricultural policy that maintained rural stability through Green Revolution subsidies rather than genuine land reform. The peasantry, in Moore's schema the class most capable of revolutionary disruption, was effectively demobilized in Indonesia through a combination of material concessions and brutal suppression of organizational capacity. The Reformasi transition of 1998, precipitated by the Asian financial crisis and urban middle-class protest, superficially resembles the Moorean scenario in which a commercially empowered bourgeoisie extracts democratic reforms, but the subsequent two decades have revealed how shallow the structural foundations of that transition actually were.
The broader Southeast Asian context amplifies the significance of Indonesia's experience. Across the region, a wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s has given way to what scholars now describe as a democratic recession, with Thailand's repeated military coups, the Philippines' Duterte-era assault on institutional checks, Myanmar's catastrophic military seizure of power in 2021, and Malaysia's persistent factional instability all pointing toward the fragility of electoral democracy when structural conditions remain unfavorable. Indonesia had long been held up as a counterexample — the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority country to sustain competitive elections over a generation. Yet the Joko Widodo presidency (2014-2024) presided over significant democratic regression: the criminalization of blasphemy and dissent, the manipulation of electoral rules to benefit political dynasties, and the reintegration of military figures into civilian roles that democratic reformers had worked hard to foreclose. The election of Prabowo Subianto to the presidency in 2024 — a former military commander with a documented record of human rights violations under the New Order — marked a watershed moment that demands structural explanation rather than simply biographical analysis. A Moorean reading would direct attention to the class forces that made Prabowo's victory possible: the fragmentation of the urban middle class that had anchored reformist politics, the consolidation of oligarchic networks that benefit from weak regulatory institutions, and the continued organizational weakness of labor and smallholder agriculture as independent political actors.
The policy and research implications of this analysis extend well beyond Indonesia's borders. For donors and international organizations engaged in democratic governance programming, the Moorean lens offers a salutary corrective to institution-centric approaches that focus on electoral administration, judicial reform, and anti-corruption mechanisms without adequately attending to the underlying class structure and property relations that determine whether those institutions can be made to function. Aid programs that strengthen civil society without addressing the structural conditions under which civil society organizations either thrive or are captured by elite interests are likely to produce minimal durable gains. For researchers, the article's engagement with Moore raises important methodological questions about the applicability of historically derived macro-structural frameworks to contemporary cases shaped by global finance, digital media, and transnational civil society networks that Moore could not have anticipated. Future scholarship will need to grapple with how the structural conditions for democracy or authoritarianism are now partly constituted at a global rather than purely domestic scale — through investment treaties, international financial institution conditionality, great power competition, and the diffusion of surveillance technologies that dramatically lower the cost of authoritarian social control. Indonesia's trajectory in the coming decade, as Prabowo's government consolidates its position and the reform coalitions of the late 1990s further disintegrate, will constitute a powerful natural experiment in whether the structural determinants Moore identified can be overcome through deliberate institutional design and civil society mobilization, or whether, as his framework suggests, the deeper regularities of class power ultimately prevail.