Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-26
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies traverse the treacherous terrain between authoritarian rule and democratic governance has never been more pressing. Across the Indo-Pacific, democratic institutions face mounting stress from resurgent nationalism, elite capture, and the structural legacies of authoritarian developmentalism. Against this backdrop, returning to the foundational theoretical frameworks of comparative politics — particularly Barrington Moore Jr.'s seminal Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy — with fresh empirical eyes offers something beyond mere academic exercise. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and Southeast Asia's most populous nation, presents itself as an exceptional laboratory for stress-testing Moore's mid-twentieth-century hypotheses. The decision to revisit Moore through Indonesia in the Journal of Contemporary Asia speaks directly to a growing scholarly consensus that the analytical tools forged in the crucible of European and East Asian historical sociology require substantial recalibration before they can illuminate the political trajectories of postcolonial societies in the Global South.
Barrington Moore's central thesis, advanced in 1966 and still debated six decades later, identified the fate of modern political regimes as fundamentally rooted in the configuration of agrarian class relations during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Moore, the presence of a commercially oriented landed gentry allied with an ascending bourgeoisie produced liberal democracy, as in England. Where the state drove capitalist transformation from above in alliance with a landed aristocracy hostile to peasant autonomy, fascism or authoritarian nationalism emerged, as in Germany and Japan. And where a revolutionary peasantry was mobilized against both landlords and the capitalist state, communist revolutions followed, as in China and Russia. What makes Indonesia so theoretically generative is that it defies each of these schematic pathways in instructive ways, forcing any Moorean analysis to expose the framework's structural assumptions and test their universality. Indonesia's colonial experience under the Dutch — which created a peculiarly fragmented agrarian structure, a politically marginalized indigenous commercial class, and a deeply penetrated peasant economy — left the newly independent republic with class configurations Moore's framework was never designed to accommodate.
The article under examination evidently grapples with this misfit in a systematic way, tracing how Indonesia moved through the authoritarian interlude of Sukarno's Guided Democracy (1957–1965), the consolidation of Suharto's New Order military-bureaucratic dictatorship (1966–1998), and the remarkable democratic transition of Reformasi. From a Moorean perspective, each phase demands distinct analytical treatment. Suharto's New Order was not simply a transient authoritarianism imposed by historical accident; it represented a coherent developmental authoritarian project in which the military functioned as a quasi-agrarian ruling class substitute, suppressing labor and peasant movements while fostering crony capitalist networks among ethnic Chinese business conglomerates. Moore's framework, with its emphasis on the landed gentry's political role, struggles to capture a regime in which the military simultaneously occupied the state apparatus, regulated the market, and substituted for the landed class as the primary agent of agricultural surplus extraction. The abortive communist mobilization of the mid-1960s, which culminated in the 1965-1966 massacres that exterminated the PKI and cleared the path for Suharto, offers the most chilling intersection with Moore's theoretical universe: here was a peasant-linked political movement destroyed not by the trajectory of historical capitalism but by a military counter-revolution with Cold War backing — a sequence Moore's framework cannot straightforwardly absorb.
The Reformasi transition of 1998 and its aftermath present yet another theoretical puzzle. Moore was generally skeptical that democratic outcomes could be secured without a prior bourgeois revolution — without, that is, a commercially vigorous class capable of winning autonomy from the state and establishing the rule of law as a precondition of property rights. Indonesia's democratization occurred under precisely the opposite conditions: the bourgeoisie was discredited by its association with Suharto-era crony capitalism, the peasantry remained politically demobilized, and the military retained formal institutional prerogatives within the new democratic order through the dwifungsi doctrine's formal abolition but informal survival. What drove the transition was not a confident bourgeoisie but a coalition of urban middle-class reformers, student movements, and portions of the political elite calculating that democratic proceduralism offered the best mechanism for managing elite competition in the post-Suharto vacuum. This is democracy without Moore's preconditions — or, more precisely, it is a path that Moore's tripartite schema had no room to chart. The scholarly contribution of revisiting Moore through this case is, therefore, not simply to demonstrate that the framework fails on Indonesian soil but to illuminate precisely which of its structural propositions are contingent on Western European historical sequencing and which might contain transferable analytical cores.
The implications for ODA, civil society, and development policy are substantial and underappreciated. If the structural determinism embedded in Moore's framework is partially valid — if long-run agrarian class configurations do shape the political sustainability of democratic institutions — then development actors must attend more carefully to the distributional politics of rural transformation in emerging democracies. Indonesia's democratic consolidation has been accompanied by persistent concerns about elite capture of formal institutions, the resurgence of oligarchic politics, and what scholars have termed "oligarchic democracy," in which competitive elections coexist with highly concentrated economic and political power. Civil society organizations, which played a critical role in the Reformasi transition and have been supported by bilateral and multilateral ODA programs, now find themselves navigating a more ambiguous political terrain in which democratic forms are maintained while substantive accountability weakens. Moore's framework, recalibrated for postcolonial conditions, would suggest that without more fundamental changes in the distribution of economic assets and the autonomy of civil society from state and oligarchic patronage, Indonesia's democratic institutions remain structurally fragile — a finding with direct implications for how international donors conceptualize the relationship between governance programming, economic inequality, and democratic consolidation.
Looking forward, the theoretical exercise of applying and revising Moore's framework to Indonesia carries methodological implications for the broader field of comparative democratization that should not be underestimated. As scholars and practitioners grapple with democratic backsliding across Southeast Asia — in the Philippines, Thailand, and Myanmar — the temptation to reach for universalist models that predict transitions based on per capita income thresholds or civil society density indices must be tempered by the kind of historically grounded, class-sensitive analysis that Moore pioneered, even if his specific conclusions require substantial revision. Indonesia will remain a crucial reference point in this debate precisely because it demonstrates that democracy can take root under materially unfavorable Moorean conditions, and yet also that the absence of those conditions leaves democratic institutions exposed to erosion over the medium term. Researchers and ODA practitioners who engage seriously with this literature will be better equipped to distinguish between the formal consolidation of democratic procedures and the deeper social transformations that might, in Moore's ultimate spirit if not his specific schema, produce the durable democratic cultures that development agendas aspire to foster.