Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies transition to democracy while others slide toward authoritarian consolidation remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics. In an era marked by democratic backsliding across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of Europe, revisiting the classical theoretical frameworks that sought to explain these divergent pathways carries renewed urgency. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, takes up precisely this challenge by applying the analytical lens of Barrington Moore's landmark 1966 work — Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy — to the Indonesian case. This is a theoretically ambitious undertaking. Moore's framework, grounded in the class coalitions of agrarian transformation in early modern Europe and Asia, was never designed with postcolonial Southeast Asia primarily in mind. The effort to apply it to Indonesia therefore demands critical interrogation of whether the framework travels well across time and geography, and what its application reveals — or distorts — about one of the world's most demographically significant democracies.
Barrington Moore's central argument, famously condensed in the aphorism "no bourgeois, no democracy," posited that the political trajectories of modernizing societies — toward liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution — were shaped decisively by the nature of agrarian class relations during the transition to commercial agriculture, and by the relative strength of independent bourgeois interests vis-à-vis landed elites and the state. Where a commercially assertive bourgeoisie succeeded in breaking the power of the agrarian upper class and forging alliances with state institutions on its own terms, parliamentary democracy became viable. Where landlords maintained dominance and commercialized agriculture through coercive labor control, the conditions for fascist or authoritarian outcomes emerged. And where peasants were mobilized in revolution against both landed and urban elites, communist outcomes followed. The elegance of Moore's tripartite schema gave it extraordinary influence, but scholars have long noted its limited applicability to postcolonial societies, where the sequencing of state formation, colonial extraction, and class development followed entirely different logics than in Western Europe or Japan. This is the tension that an Indonesia-focused application must confront head-on.
Indonesia's political history offers a genuinely complex case for class-based structural analysis. The New Order regime under General Suharto, which consolidated power after the violent suppression of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in 1965–66, governed for over three decades by systematically subordinating both civil society and the emerging private sector to state and military authority. The Indonesian bourgeoisie that did develop during the New Order period was overwhelmingly dependent on state patronage, ethnic Chinese capital networks operating under discriminatory but economically privileged arrangements, and military-linked conglomerates — hardly the autonomous, class-conscious commercial bourgeoisie Moore identified as the social carrier of democracy. The agrarian transformation that occurred under New Order development policy likewise proceeded through technocratic Green Revolution programs rather than through the kind of disruptive commercialization that Moore associated with explosive class conflict. The peasantry was largely depoliticized through state agricultural institutions and the emasculation of rural political organizations after 1965. If Moore's framework predicts anything from these conditions, it would seem to predict the durable authoritarianism that the New Order indeed represented — a useful confirmatory observation, though one that requires care not to simply read the outcome backward into the explanatory framework.
What makes Indonesia genuinely theoretically interesting, and what a Moorean analysis must grapple with, is the democratic transition of 1998 and its subsequent relative consolidation. The fall of Suharto and the emergence of Reformasi-era democratic institutions occurred not through the classic bourgeois assertion that Moore's democratic pathway implies, but through a crisis of economic legitimacy precipitated by the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, combined with urban middle-class protest, student mobilization, and elite defection within the regime itself. The organized labor movement played a role, as did Islamic civil society organizations of remarkable scope and sophistication — most notably Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, whose combined membership runs into the tens of millions. These organizations represent a form of associational life that Moore's framework, oriented around class positions in agrarian production, is poorly equipped to theorize. The article likely confronts this gap directly, and in doing so raises the broader question of whether structural class analysis requires supplementation by institutional, cultural, or organizational accounts when applied to postcolonial societies where colonial legacies reshaped class formation in ways that produce no clean analogue to Moore's European cases.
The policy and research implications of this comparative exercise extend well beyond the Indonesian case. For scholars of ODA and development practice, the question of whether democratic consolidation is rooted in structural class conditions or in more contingent institutional and organizational processes has direct bearing on how external actors think about supporting governance transitions. If democracy emerges from structural transformations that take generations to unfold, then short-term governance programming by bilateral and multilateral donors faces inherent limitations — it is intervening at the surface of a process whose deep determinants lie elsewhere. Moore's framework, whatever its empirical limitations, serves as a useful corrective to the technocratic optimism that has often characterized democratization assistance, by insisting that political outcomes are embedded in the long arc of social and economic transformation. At the same time, Indonesia's actual trajectory suggests that contingent factors — a charismatic reformist movement, elite cohesion or its fracture, a precipitating economic shock — can push societies across thresholds that structural conditions alone neither determine nor foreclose. This is analytically important for researchers studying the current period of democratic backsliding under Joko Widodo's consolidation of executive authority and the rise of Prabowo Subianto, a former Suharto-era military commander, to the presidency in 2024.
Looking forward, the value of revisiting Moore in the context of Indonesia lies not in confirming or refuting his structural predictions, but in the productive friction that results from applying a framework developed for early modern Europe to a twenty-first-century postcolonial democracy that remains in many ways unfinished. Indonesia's democratic institutions are real and have shown unexpected resilience, yet the structural conditions that Moore associated with durable liberal democracy — an autonomous, politically assertive bourgeoisie, a civil society independent of both state and religious hierarchy, a rural class transformation that produced neither a coercive landed elite nor an explosive peasant radicalism — remain ambiguous or incomplete. The country sits in a space that Moore's tripartite schema does not cleanly accommodate, which is precisely what makes it theoretically productive. For researchers in comparative politics and development studies, and for practitioners engaged in civil society strengthening and democratic governance programming across the Global South, this kind of historically grounded, structurally attentive analysis offers essential perspective. It reminds us that democracy is not a default outcome of economic development or institutional engineering, but a contingent achievement rooted in the particular history of how societies organized production, power, and collective life — and therefore that sustaining it requires attention to those deep structural continuities, not only to the surface politics of electoral cycles and legislative procedures.