Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies arrive at democracy — or fail to — has rarely been more consequential than in the present moment. Across the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia, and much of the Global South, democratic institutions that appeared consolidated a decade ago are exhibiting signs of strain, while authoritarian configurations that were expected to liberalize have proven surprisingly durable. Against this backdrop, revisiting the analytical legacy of Barrington Moore Jr. — whose 1966 magnum opus Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy traced the structural preconditions for different political regimes through the lens of agrarian class coalitions — is not merely an exercise in intellectual history. It is an urgent methodological intervention. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, applies Moore's framework to the Indonesian case, a country that encompasses the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy, the fourth most populous nation on earth, and one of Southeast Asia's most dramatic examples of transition from prolonged authoritarian rule to competitive electoral politics. That such a revisitation is necessary speaks to how deeply the determinants of regime type remain contested, and how much the Indonesian case continues to resist easy categorization.
Moore's central argument was deceptively elegant: the path a society takes toward modernity — liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution — depends substantially on the balance of power among landed elites, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry at the moment of agrarian commercialization. Where a strong, commercially oriented bourgeoisie emerged capable of breaking the power of the landed aristocracy, liberal democracy became possible. Where landlords and a weak bourgeoisie allied with the state against a subordinated peasantry, the conditions for fascism ripened. Where the peasantry retained organizational coherence and landlord power was broken through revolution, communist regimes followed. The elegance of this schema, however, is also its limitation: it was drawn from the historical experiences of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India — none of which maps cleanly onto the postcolonial archipelagic state that Indonesia became after 1945. Applying Moore to Indonesia thus requires both theoretical generosity and empirical rigor, and the fact that a contemporary journal article takes up this challenge signals that the question of what structural forces produce regime outcomes in the region remains very much alive in comparative politics and development studies.
Indonesia's political history presents a genuinely complex test case. The colonial period under the Dutch East Indies administration created a particular configuration of agrarian and commercial relations — one in which indigenous landlord classes were variously co-opted, suppressed, or replaced by European plantation capital, Chinese merchant intermediaries, and an indigenous priyayi administrative elite serving as local collaborators. The result was an agrarian structure that did not map neatly onto European patterns: there was neither a powerful independent bourgeoisie nor a peasantry with strong autonomous organizational traditions of the kind Moore identified in China. What emerged instead after independence was a weak parliamentary democracy quickly overtaken by Sukarno's Guided Democracy and then, after the violent transition of 1965–1966, by Suharto's New Order — a developmental authoritarian regime that lasted thirty-two years. The New Order drew its sustaining coalition from the military (ABRI), a technocratic state apparatus, and Indonesian and Chinese-Indonesian business conglomerates who benefited from regime patronage. This configuration bears some resemblance to Moore's fascist pathway in the sense that a weak indigenous bourgeoisie aligned with a militarized state against peasant and labor mobilization, yet the comparison is imperfect: Suharto's Indonesia was not ideologically fascist, and the suppression of the left in 1965 was a precondition rather than a product of the coalition he assembled.
The transition to democracy that followed Suharto's resignation in 1998 — the Reformasi — raises equally difficult questions about Moorean causality. If structural preconditions for democracy were absent or weak, why did Indonesia democratize? The available evidence suggests that the answer lies not in a transformation of the underlying class coalition but rather in the conjunctural pressure of the Asian financial crisis, the fracturing of the military's internal unity, and the mobilization of urban civil society, students, and a nascent NGO sector that had grown in the interstices of the New Order. This last factor is particularly significant for researchers in the ODA and civil society space: donor-funded civil society organizations, human rights networks, and press freedom advocacy groups played a measurable role in sustaining a public sphere and an oppositional vocabulary during the Suharto years and in accelerating transition pressures in 1998. Indonesia thus illustrates both the limits of purely structuralist explanations and the agency-level contributions of civil society, international development assistance, and institutional reform programs in shaping political outcomes. The article's engagement with Moore becomes most theoretically productive precisely at these junctures where structural determinism gives way to contingency and actor-level choice.
The policy implications of this kind of analysis extend well beyond academic debate. For development practitioners and ODA strategists working in transitional or hybrid democratic contexts, the Moorean framework raises pointed questions about the conditions under which external support for democratic governance can take root. If the underlying class coalition is inhospitable — if landed elites, a compradorist bourgeoisie, or a militarized state retain sufficient cohesion to capture or neutralize reform pressures — then governance programs focused on electoral administration, anti-corruption institutions, or civil society capacity may have limited transformative effect. The Indonesian experience after Reformasi, where democratic consolidation proceeded further than structural conditions alone would have predicted, suggests that international democracy support is neither irrelevant nor sufficient: it is one variable among several, and its effectiveness is conditioned by the political economy of the society it enters. Indonesia's current trajectory — marked by democratic backsliding concerns, the rehabilitation of military figures in civilian governance under Prabowo Subianto, and the narrowing of civic space in certain domains — reinforces the point that democratic transitions do not follow linear paths and that structural pressures can reassert themselves in new forms decades after a formal transition.
Looking forward, the revisitation of Moore's framework for Indonesia carries implications that are relevant to both comparative political scientists and to practitioners engaged with the region. First, it underscores the need for historically grounded analysis that resists treating democratization as a linear process driven primarily by institutional design or economic development levels. Second, it highlights the importance of attending to the specific configurations of class, capital, and coercive power in each country rather than applying universal templates drawn from Western European trajectories. Third, and most immediately, it invites reflection on what the Indonesian case tells us about democratic resilience under conditions of elite reconfiguration — when the military-business-state coalition of the New Order era reasserts influence through electoral channels rather than coup politics. For IOCSS and the broader community of civil society researchers, these are not abstract theoretical concerns: they bear directly on how donor communities should calibrate their democracy assistance portfolios, how civil society organizations should frame their advocacy in environments of partial liberalization, and how scholarly institutions should position their analytical work to remain policy-relevant without sacrificing intellectual independence. Barrington Moore wrote at a moment when the question of which societies would become democratic seemed answerable through structural analysis. The Indonesian case, then and now, reminds us that the answer is never final — and that the conditions under which democracy persists or erodes deserve sustained, rigorous, comparative attention.