Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-31
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at stable democratic governance while others slide into authoritarianism has occupied comparative political scientists for more than half a century, yet it has rarely felt more urgent than it does today. Across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, democratic gains achieved through hard-fought transitions are being eroded by incumbents who use the very instruments of electoral democracy — parliaments, courts, constitutional amendments — to consolidate illiberal power. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority nation to have undergone a successful democratic transition, sits at the center of this global debate. Its post-1998 Reformasi experiment has long been held up as a model of peaceful democratic consolidation in a complex, pluralistic society, and yet observers have increasingly noted worrying signs of institutional erosion, military reassertion, and elite recapture of democratic processes. Against this backdrop, a new article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisits Barrington Moore's classical framework to interrogate the structural foundations of Indonesia's democratic and authoritarian pathways, offering a historically grounded analysis that carries considerable implications for how scholars and practitioners understand democratic resilience and fragility in the contemporary global order.
Barrington Moore's 1966 masterwork, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed a sweeping structural argument about the class conditions that channel societies toward different political destinies. Moore identified three broad pathways: a bourgeois-led revolution that produced liberal democracy, as in England, France, and the United States; a conservative revolution from above led by agrarian and aristocratic elites that produced fascism, as in Germany and Japan; and a peasant-led revolution that produced communism, as in China and Russia. His most famous formulation — "no bourgeois, no democracy" — encapsulated his conviction that the emergence of an independent commercial class willing and able to challenge the landed aristocracy and the crown was the decisive precondition for democratic politics. The analytical power of this framework derived not from any teleological certainty but from its insistence that political outcomes are rooted in agrarian social structures, patterns of commercialization, and the relative strength of competing class coalitions. Applying this lens to Indonesia is a theoretically ambitious undertaking, because Indonesia's colonial experience under the Dutch, its post-independence trajectory under Sukarno's Guided Democracy, and the brutally repressive but economically modernizing New Order of Suharto do not map neatly onto any of Moore's three archetypes. The article under examination takes this misfit seriously, using it as a productive analytical entry point rather than a liability.
Indonesia's political history is, in many respects, a story of structural ambiguity of precisely the kind Moore's framework helps to illuminate. The Dutch colonial economy, centered on the Cultivation System and its successor plantation arrangements, did not generate an autonomous indigenous bourgeoisie in the way that English agrarian capitalism did. Instead, it produced a bifurcated economic structure in which ethnic Chinese commercial intermediaries occupied the trading and credit functions that, in Moore's canonical cases, were performed by a national bourgeoisie capable of demanding political rights. The indigenous Javanese elite — the priyayi — was integrated into colonial administration rather than into independent commerce, creating a pattern of state-dependent elite formation that would persist long after independence. Sukarno's Guided Democracy and, far more consequentially, the 1965 coup attempt and the subsequent anti-communist massacres that brought Suharto to power were not simply the results of elite manipulation or foreign interference, though both were present. They were also expressions of underlying structural tensions between a weakly constituted national bourgeoisie, a deeply politicized military that had filled organizational vacuums left by colonial rule, and a peasantry whose mobilization through the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) alarmed landed and urban interests. Suharto's New Order resolved these tensions through violence and authoritarian developmentalism, suppressing class conflict while accelerating capitalist transformation in ways that, paradoxically, began to generate the middle-class constituencies that democratic theory would predict as a stabilizing force.
The 1998 Reformasi transition, triggered by the Asian financial crisis and the sudden delegitimation of the New Order's technocratic performance claims, appeared at first to validate Moore's bourgeois-democracy thesis in its Southeast Asian variant. A rapidly urbanizing middle class, student activists, and NGO networks combined to force Suharto's resignation and initiate a decentralization of political power that was genuinely radical by regional standards. Competitive elections, a free press, and a vibrant civil society all emerged with unexpected speed. Yet the structural analysis offered by a Moorean perspective suggests caution about reading these outcomes as the product of a consolidated social transformation. Indonesia's democratic transition rested heavily on elite negotiation and institutional engineering rather than on a deep realignment of class forces. The military retained significant social and economic interests without formal constitutional guarantees, regional oligarchs adapted to electoral politics without abandoning patronage networks, and the commercial bourgeoisie that democracy theory identifies as democracy's natural constituency remained entangled with state contracts and regulatory favor in ways that made it an unreliable champion of rule-of-law norms. The article in question appears to foreground these structural continuities as a means of explaining both the durability and the fragility of Indonesia's democratic achievement — a duality that has become increasingly visible in the years following Joko Widodo's presidency and the 2024 electoral victory of Prabowo Subianto, a former military commander with direct links to New Order-era human rights violations.
The broader regional and global significance of this analysis extends well beyond Indonesia's borders. Southeast Asia as a whole has witnessed a sharp democratic recession over the past decade, with military coups in Myanmar, competitive authoritarianism in the Philippines under Duterte and his successors, and persistent backsliding in Thailand. These cases share with Indonesia a common structural inheritance: colonial economies that did not generate autonomous national bourgeoisies, post-independence states in which the military played a formative developmental and political role, and democratic transitions that were driven more by elite accommodation than by transformative class coalitions. Moore's framework, applied with appropriate historical sensitivity, offers a sobering corrective to the transitology literature of the 1990s, which tended to treat democratic consolidation as a function of institutional design and normative learning rather than of durable structural conditions. For international donors and ODA practitioners, this has direct operational implications. Development assistance programs oriented toward civil society strengthening, electoral administration, and governance reform have often proceeded as if the structural preconditions for democratic consolidation were either already in place or could be rapidly installed through capacity-building interventions. A Moorean reading suggests instead that these programs may be working at the surface of political life while the deeper structural conditions — patterns of land and capital ownership, the organization of state and military interests, the integration or exclusion of subordinate classes from productive economic life — continue to shape political outcomes in ways that donor-funded programs rarely reach.
Looking forward, the intersection of structural analysis and contemporary democratic theory raises a set of pressing questions for both researchers and practitioners. If Indonesia's democratic sustainability is indeed constrained by the incomplete transformation of its class structure — if, in other words, the bourgeoisie remains too dependent on the state, the military too embedded in civilian economic life, and the agrarian and urban poor too poorly organized to sustain sustained democratic pressure — then the prospects for a genuine deepening of democratic practice will depend on the trajectory of these structural factors rather than on any particular electoral outcome or constitutional reform. The rise of a gig economy, the expansion of social media as a site of political organization, and the growth of a formally educated urban workforce are all potential vectors of structural change, but whether they will cohere into the kind of politically effective class coalition that Moore identified as democracy's social foundation remains deeply uncertain. For the scholarly community, articles of this kind — which bring classical comparative-historical sociology to bear on contemporary political dynamics — represent an important methodological intervention, reminding area studies specialists of the analytical payoff available from sustained engagement with macro-level structural theory. For civil society organizations and their international partners, the implication is perhaps more uncomfortable: that the work of democratic consolidation is generational in its time horizon and structural in its logic, demanding not only programmatic support for institutions but sustained attention to the economic and social foundations on which durable democratic governance ultimately rests.