Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at democratic governance while others slide into authoritarian rule remains among the most consequential in comparative political science. As democratic backsliding accelerates across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa — and as donors, international organizations, and civil society actors grapple with how to support governance transitions — returning to foundational theoretical frameworks offers more than intellectual exercise. A recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisiting Barrington Moore's classical thesis through the lens of Indonesia does precisely this: it anchors one of the twenty-first century's most urgent practical challenges in the structural analysis that Moore pioneered in his 1966 masterwork, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World." For scholars of development and ODA practitioners designing governance support programs, the article's historical and theoretical scope carries direct implications for how we understand — and how we attempt to engineer — democratic outcomes.
Barrington Moore's foundational argument was deceptively simple but structurally ambitious. By examining the trajectories of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India, Moore contended that the political form a modern society takes — liberal democracy, fascism, or communism — is determined largely by the character of class coalitions during the agrarian-to-industrial transition. The pivotal variable was the bourgeoisie: where a commercially assertive middle class allied with the crown and aristocracy against the peasantry, the route led to fascism or conservative authoritarianism; where the bourgeoisie allied with peasants against an aristocracy weakened by commercialized agriculture, democratic possibilities opened. Moore's formulation, compressed into the aphorism "no bourgeois, no democracy," sparked decades of debate. Critics noted his Eurocentrism and his difficulty accounting for cases outside the Western core. Applying his framework to Indonesia — a vast archipelagic state with heterogeneous class formations, a colonial legacy, and a postcolonial trajectory that passed through parliamentary democracy, guided authoritarianism, military dictatorship, and finally democratic transition — represents a rigorous theoretical stress test.
Indonesia's case is particularly rich because it encompasses, within a single national history, several of the political outcomes Moore sought to explain. The parliamentary period of the 1950s demonstrated the fragility of democratic institutions when class coalitions were weakly consolidated and party systems were organized along ethnic, religious, and regional lines rather than economic interest. Sukarno's turn to Guided Democracy in 1957 and the subsequent seizure of power by General Suharto after the 1965-1966 violence — in which hundreds of thousands of suspected communists and their affiliates were killed — illustrate with terrible clarity how the destruction of a leftist peasant movement and labor base, combined with an alliance between the military, rural landlords, and an emerging state-sponsored bourgeoisie, can foreclose the democratic path that Moore identified. Suharto's New Order, lasting three decades, was precisely the kind of modernizing authoritarian regime Moore saw as characteristic of societies where a strong agrarian elite and a dependent commercial class collaborate under military tutelage. The state's penetration of civil society, the suppression of independent trade unions, and the cooptation of religious organizations all bear the structural marks that Moore's framework would predict.
The 1998 Reformasi movement and Indonesia's subsequent democratization, however, present the more theoretically challenging puzzle. Moore's framework, derived from pre-twentieth-century transitions, does not easily accommodate cases where democratization is triggered by economic crisis, elite fracture, and urban middle-class mobilization in a context of already-established capitalism. Indonesia's transition came not from a revolutionary peasant alliance nor from a bourgeois triumph over landed aristocracy, but from the collapse of a patronage network under the stress of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, combined with student mobilization, NGO activism, and defections within the military's own ranks. This invites revision of Moore's framework rather than its wholesale rejection. Scholars who have followed Moore — Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John Stephens prominent among them — already argued that the organized working class and civil society actors matter more in twentieth-century democratization than Moore acknowledged. Indonesia's experience reinforces this revision while also demonstrating that democratic consolidation remains elusive when the oligarchic coalitions that underpinned authoritarian rule survive the formal transition intact and reshape democratic institutions from within.
The policy implications radiating from this kind of structural analysis deserve careful attention from ODA practitioners and governance-support institutions. Programs that focus on elections, constitutional reform, or anti-corruption mechanisms in isolation risk misunderstanding the class-structural conditions that make these institutions work or fail. Indonesia's post-1998 democracy is genuine in its procedural dimensions — competitive elections, a free press, active civil society — yet analysts consistently note the persistence of oligarchic power, the weakness of redistributive policy, and the vulnerability of democratic norms to elite manipulation. This pattern, visible also in the Philippines, Thailand, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, suggests that supporting democracy requires engaging with the economic power structures that determine who benefits from and who threatens open governance. Development assistance directed at civil society organizations, labor rights, and land tenure reform — precisely the domains Moore's analysis illuminates — may do more to stabilize democratic institutions than technical assistance to election commissions or court systems alone.
Looking forward, Indonesia's trajectory will be watched closely as a bellwether for middle-income democratization in the Global South. The country's upcoming electoral cycles, its management of resource nationalism, its relationship with an increasingly assertive military-linked business sector, and the political fortunes of organized civil society will all reveal whether the class coalitions that sustain democracy are deepening or eroding. For researchers, the article's engagement with Moore invites a productive research agenda: comparative studies of class formation and political outcomes across ASEAN, examinations of how global capital flows reshape domestic class structures in ways Moore could not have anticipated, and analysis of whether international civil society support can substitute — even partially — for the domestic bourgeois or working-class agency that Moore's framework treats as structurally necessary. Whether Moore's nineteenth-century European typologies can be adapted to twenty-first-century archipelagic states remains an open and generative question, and Indonesia, with its scale, diversity, and democratic ambition, stands as the most important test case for the answer.