Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies arrive at democracy or authoritarianism has rarely been more consequential than in the present moment. Across the globe, democratic institutions face pressure from resurgent nationalism, concentrated economic power, and the erosion of civic norms that once seemed durable. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority nation, occupies a particularly instructive position within this debate. Home to over 270 million people and a political history that encompasses colonial extraction, military dictatorship, mass violence, and a landmark democratic transition in 1998, Indonesia provides one of the most complex and revealing cases for testing classical theories of political development. The engagement of contemporary scholarship with Barrington Moore's enduring framework — articulated in his 1966 masterwork "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" — signals a renewed commitment within comparative politics to understanding Indonesia not merely as a regional story but as a global theoretical touchstone. That such an analysis appears in the Journal of Contemporary Asia reflects the growing urgency among area studies scholars to bring rigorous structural thinking to bear on Southeast Asia's democratic futures at a moment when those futures are genuinely uncertain.
Barrington Moore's foundational argument, distilled into the memorable formulation "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," rested on an analysis of how class coalitions formed during the agrarian-to-industrial transition shaped the political institutions that emerged in its wake. Moore identified three broad pathways: the liberal democratic route of England, France, and the United States, built on commercial agriculture, a powerful landed gentry that gradually yielded power, and an ascending bourgeoisie; the fascist route of Germany and Japan, where a weak bourgeoisie aligned with reactionary agrarian elites to produce capitalist modernization without democratic politics; and the communist route of Russia and China, where a peasant revolution swept away both landlord and bourgeois classes. The genius of Moore's framework was structural and historical at once — it insisted that the social arrangements of the agrarian world cast long shadows over the political possibilities of industrial modernity. Applying this to Indonesia requires both fidelity to Moore's method and willingness to adapt it, since Indonesia fits none of the original three pathways cleanly. The Dutch colonial economy produced plantation agriculture organized around export commodities — sugar, rubber, tobacco — that did not generate the kind of independent, politically assertive landowning class Moore identified in England, nor a peasantry with the organizational capacity for revolutionary mobilization on the scale of China. Instead, colonial capitalism produced fragmented agrarian structures and urban commercial classes that were partly Sino-Indonesian and partly tied to the colonial state, a configuration that complicated straightforward class-based predictions about Indonesia's postcolonial trajectory.
The history of post-independence Indonesia illuminates precisely these complications. Sukarno's guided democracy was a hybrid of nationalist mobilization and executive personalism that bypassed the institutional development Moore associated with liberal democratic consolidation. The 1965-1966 violence — in which an estimated 500,000 to one million people were killed following the alleged communist coup attempt — eliminated the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, which had represented one plausible vehicle for the peasant-based mobilization that Moore theorized in his communist pathway. What emerged was Suharto's New Order: a developmental authoritarianism resting on a military-bureaucratic-corporate coalition, massive foreign investment, and the controlled exclusion of both Islamic political forces and organized labor from meaningful power. This configuration might be read in Moorean terms as an approximation of a fascist pathway — capitalist modernization under authoritarian auspices, with the military playing the role that agrarian reactionaries played in Weimar Germany — but the comparison is imperfect because the Indonesian military was not the instrument of a landed aristocracy but rather a postcolonial institution with its own territorial and commercial interests. The New Order generated rapid economic growth while suppressing the civil society formations that Moore associated with the preconditions for eventual democratization.
The reformasi transition of 1998, triggered by the Asian financial crisis and the collapse of Suharto's legitimacy, poses the most interesting challenge for Moorean analysis. Indonesia achieved a relatively rapid and peaceful transition to competitive multiparty democracy without the strong bourgeoisie that Moore considered indispensable. Scholars working in the tradition of comparative democratization have variously attributed Indonesia's democratic opening to the defection of elite factions from the Suharto coalition, the mobilizing capacity of urban civil society, the role of student movements, and the structural constraints imposed by Indonesia's federal-style administrative geography. The subsequent two decades of democratic consolidation produced real but imperfect gains: a free press, competitive elections, decentralization, and civilian oversight of the military grew alongside persistent problems of money politics, oligarchic capture of parties, and the instrumentalization of religious identity by political entrepreneurs. The election of Joko Widodo in 2014 was widely read as evidence that Indonesian democracy could produce non-elite outsiders, yet Widodo's own tenure was marked by democratic backsliding, including the use of blasphemy laws against political opponents and accommodation of military and business interests that recalled New Order patterns. The 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto, a former military commander with documented connections to human rights abuses under Suharto, raises sharper questions about whether Indonesia's democratic pathway has reached a stable equilibrium or whether the structural conditions Moore emphasized — particularly the absence of a genuinely autonomous and democratically committed bourgeoisie — continue to constrain the depth of democratic consolidation.
For scholars and practitioners engaged with ODA, civil society development, and governance programming in Southeast Asia, the Moorean lens offers both sobering and generative insights. The sobering lesson is structural: if democratic consolidation depends on class coalitions rather than simply on institutional design or elite commitment, then the prospects for sustained democratization in countries where oligarchic capitalism and state-linked business networks dominate the economy are inherently constrained. External democracy promotion that focuses primarily on electoral mechanics or anti-corruption frameworks without addressing the underlying political economy of class power risks treating symptoms rather than causes. The generative lesson is historical: Moore's own cases showed that pathways are not fixed in advance, that contingent events and coalitional shifts can alter trajectories even within structural constraints, and that civil society — broadly construed to include labor movements, religious organizations, peasant associations, and urban professional networks — plays a genuinely constitutive role in shaping which pathway a society follows. Indonesia's NGO sector, its independent judiciary advocates, its investigative journalism community, and its tradition of pesantren-based civic education represent precisely the kind of autonomous social formations that Moore's framework, however imperfectly, recognized as democratically significant. The scholarly work of situating Indonesia within and against Moore's framework thus has direct implications for how international development organizations design civil society support programs, how donor governments calibrate their engagement with Indonesian counterparts, and how Indonesian reformers understand the structural terrain on which they operate. As Indonesia navigates a political moment in which democratic norms face pressure from above and below, comparative historical analysis of the kind that Moore pioneered — and that contemporary scholars are now applying to the Indonesian case with fresh data and theoretical sophistication — remains indispensable for any serious account of where Indonesian democracy has been, and where it might yet go.