Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at democracy while others descend into authoritarian rule has occupied political scientists and historians for decades, yet it retains urgent relevance in a contemporary moment marked by democratic recession across the developing world. Indonesia's political trajectory — from colonial subjugation through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, Suharto's New Order military authoritarianism, the remarkable democratic opening of 1998 known as Reformasi, and now an increasingly contested democratic consolidation — offers one of the most instructive and underexamined cases in comparative political development. By revisiting Barrington Moore's foundational theoretical architecture from "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" (1966) and applying it to the Indonesian case, the article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia performs a genuinely valuable analytical service: it reconnects the empirical richness of Southeast Asian political history to a body of structural-historical theory that has shaped comparative politics for six decades, asking whether Moore's pathways remain analytically useful in a postcolonial, resource-dependent, and ethnically complex society.
Barrington Moore's central argument, constructed from comparative historical analysis of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, and China, held that the political outcome of modernization — liberal democracy, fascist authoritarianism, or communist revolution — was determined primarily by the balance of class forces during the transition from agrarian to industrial society. Specifically, Moore identified the commercialization of agriculture, the relative strength of the bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the landed aristocracy and the peasantry, and the form of alliance between dominant classes and the state as the decisive variables. The path to democracy required a strong, autonomous bourgeoisie capable of constraining royal or aristocratic power; the path to fascism involved a weak bourgeoisie aligning with a reactionary landed elite against a subordinated peasantry and urban working class; and the communist path emerged where the peasantry was sufficiently coherent and aggrieved to carry out revolutionary transformation. Applying this schema to Indonesia immediately raises productive tensions, because Indonesia's colonial experience under the Dutch fundamentally disrupted the organic development of class structures that Moore assumed, while the country's extraordinary ethnic, regional, and religious heterogeneity complicates any attempt to identify a nationally unified class dynamic.
The Indonesian case, when examined through a Moorean lens, reveals both the enduring utility and the significant limits of structural-historical approaches. The New Order regime of Suharto (1966–1998) exhibits strong affinities with what Moore characterized as the reactionary path: a military-bureaucratic elite suppressed both organized labor and political Islam, cultivated a dependent Chinese-Indonesian commercial bourgeoisie that lacked autonomous political ambition, and used state patronage over agricultural commodity sectors to incorporate regional elites. This arrangement was not fascism in the European sense, but it shares the structural logic Moore identified — a dominant coalition that prevented the emergence of independent class actors capable of demanding democratic accountability. The collapse of this arrangement in 1998 was precipitated not by a triumphant bourgeoisie asserting rights against the state, but by a convergence of economic crisis, student mobilization, elite defection, and international pressure — a combination that Moore's framework struggles to accommodate, since it assigns limited agency to such conjunctural factors. This gap between structural determination and historical contingency is one of the most generative analytical tensions that the article surfaces.
The policy and research implications of revisiting Moore in the Indonesian context extend well beyond academic historiography, touching directly on contemporary debates about democratic backsliding in the Indo-Pacific and the relationship between civil society, economic structure, and political regime durability. Indonesia's post-Reformasi democracy produced genuine institutional achievements: competitive elections, decentralization, a free press, and civil society organizations operating across a vast archipelago of seventeen thousand islands. Yet concerns about democratic quality have mounted steadily, particularly with the consolidation of power under figures with roots in the New Order military establishment and the accommodation of oligarchic economic interests within the formal democratic framework. Moore's insight that democratic forms without structural transformation of underlying class power tend to be fragile resonates powerfully here: Indonesian democracy has largely coexisted with, rather than dismantled, the patterns of resource extraction, patronage politics, and military-business interpenetration that defined the authoritarian period. For civil society organizations, development practitioners, and ODA donors working on governance in Indonesia, this structural reading is a corrective to overly proceduralist assessments that equate electoral competition with democratic consolidation.
Looking forward, the analytical framework surfaced in this article has important implications for how researchers and practitioners understand democratic resilience in middle-income, resource-rich states across the Global South. Indonesia's experience suggests that Barrington Moore's pathways are not one-time historical trajectories but ongoing structural pressures that can reassert themselves when economic shocks, elite realignment, or geopolitical shifts alter the balance of class forces. The rise of digital authoritarianism, the weaponization of legal and administrative mechanisms against civil society, and the increasing use of resource nationalism to consolidate executive power are all phenomena visible in contemporary Indonesia that a structuralist analysis helps to contextualize. For the field of ODA and civil society studies, this means that governance programming cannot treat Indonesia as a democracy that simply needs institutional fine-tuning; it must grapple with the deeper question of whether the social and economic foundations for durable democratic accountability have been laid. Scholarly work that bridges classical comparative politics theory and contemporary Southeast Asian empirical research, as this article appears to do, is precisely the kind of intellectual contribution that development research and policy communities need as they navigate an increasingly complex global landscape where the pathways Moore mapped in the twentieth century continue to shape twenty-first century political outcomes in ways that neither simple optimism nor simple pessimism can adequately capture.