Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-13
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of what conditions give rise to democratic governance versus authoritarian consolidation remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics, and it has lost none of its urgency in the current moment. Across Southeast Asia and the broader Global South, the post-Cold War optimism about democratic diffusion has given way to a more sobering reckoning: democracies stall, backslide, or collapse under pressures that neither liberal institutionalism nor modernization theory adequately predicted. It is precisely this intellectual deficit that makes the revisitation of Barrington Moore Jr.'s foundational 1966 work, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," so timely and intellectually generative. The article under consideration, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, applies Moore's structural-historical framework to the Indonesian case — a country whose twentieth-century political trajectory traversed colonial subjugation, post-independence authoritarian consolidation, mass political violence, developmentalist dictatorship, and ultimately a democratic opening that remains contested to this day. By returning to Moore's class-analytic lens, the article invites scholars and practitioners alike to reconsider whether the deep structural factors that Moore identified in European and East Asian contexts carry explanatory weight for a vast archipelagic state whose social formations were shaped by Dutch colonial capitalism, smallholder agrarian politics, and a military that came to function as a class unto itself.
Barrington Moore's central argument, distilled in his famous dictum that "no bourgeois, no democracy," holds that the pathway to liberal democracy depends critically on the emergence of an independent commercial bourgeoisie capable of challenging landlord and crown power, and on the subordination or transformation of the peasantry in ways that do not generate revolutionary communist pressure. Where landlords retained political dominance and forged repressive alliances with a weak state and dependent bourgeoisie — as in Germany and Japan — the outcome was fascism. Where peasant-based revolutionary movements succeeded — as in China and Russia — the outcome was communist authoritarianism. The article's application of this schema to Indonesia is analytically rich because Indonesia does not map cleanly onto any of Moore's three pathways. Colonial Dutch policy, particularly the Cultivation System of the nineteenth century, created an agrarian structure in which smallholder peasants were coerced into export crop production but never subjected to the enclosure-style dispossession that characterized English agrarian capitalism. There was no powerful landed aristocracy in the European sense, but neither did a robust indigenous bourgeoisie emerge capable of wresting political initiative from the colonial state. Independence in 1945 thus arrived without the class prerequisites that Moore associated with democratic consolidation, leaving the new republic's political fate hostage to competing elite coalitions: nationalist civilian politicians, communist organizers with deep rural bases, Islamist movements, and above all the military.
The watershed of 1965 and its aftermath is the crux of the Indonesian puzzle for anyone working within a Moorean framework. The mass killings of 1965-1966, which claimed between 500,000 and one million lives — predominantly Communist Party members, affiliated peasant unions, and ethnic Chinese — constituted a violent resolution of precisely the class conflict that Moore identified as structurally determinative. The destruction of the PKI and its agrarian organizational networks effectively eliminated the revolutionary peasant pathway and cleared political space for Suharto's New Order, a regime that combined military dominance with technocratic economic management and selective capitalist development. What followed was not fascism in Moore's European sense, but a form of military-bureaucratic authoritarianism that used foreign direct investment, Green Revolution agriculture, and ODA flows from Western donors and international financial institutions to generate growth while suppressing political mobilization. The article's contribution, one may infer, lies in exploring whether this configuration represents a distinct Southeast Asian variant of the authoritarian developmental state — one that Moore's schema illuminates only partially — and what class dynamics were set in motion by three decades of New Order rule that eventually made democratization both possible and necessary.
The Reformasi transition of 1998, triggered by the Asian financial crisis and Suharto's political exhaustion, offers a further test of Moore's framework. If democracy required a bourgeoisie, Indonesia's democratic opening arrived partly through urban middle-class protest, student movements, and elite fractures within the military-business nexus that Suharto had cultivated. Yet this was not a bourgeoisie in the classical sense of an independent commercial class with property rights grounded in competitive markets; it was a class whose very existence had been enabled by New Order patronage capitalism. This structural ambiguity has direct implications for the quality and durability of Indonesian democracy. Political parties remained organizationally weak, clientelism persisted as the dominant mode of electoral mobilization, and the military retained significant formal and informal influence over civilian politics through the long-delayed reform of the dual-function doctrine. Civil society organizations — many of them initially funded through international ODA channels in the early post-Reformasi years — played a vital role in election monitoring, anti-corruption advocacy, and subnational governance reform, but they operated in a landscape where structural power remained concentrated in coalitions of business, military, and regional brokerage networks. From a development studies perspective, this underscores both the possibilities and limits of civil society strengthening as an ODA modality: external support for civic organizations can expand political voice at the margins, but it cannot substitute for the deeper class transformations that Moore identified as the foundation of durable democratic governance.
The forward-looking implications of this kind of structural analysis are considerable, both for researchers and for practitioners engaged in governance programming, ODA design, and civil society support in Indonesia and comparable cases across the Global South. The election of Prabowo Subianto to the Indonesian presidency in 2024 — a former military officer with a deeply controversial human rights record from the New Order era — has renewed questions about whether Indonesian democracy is consolidating, stalling, or drifting toward competitive authoritarianism. A Moorean reading would caution against interpreting this development in purely institutional or behavioral terms, and would instead direct analytical attention to the underlying class coalitions that Prabowo's electoral success represents: agribusiness interests, extractive sector capital, regional patronage networks, and a military-linked political infrastructure that never fully demilitarized. For international development organizations and bilateral donors, this suggests that governance programming premised on procedural democratic benchmarks — election quality, judicial independence, press freedom metrics — may systematically miss the structural drivers of authoritarian resurgence. Investing in genuine land reform, labor rights, smallholder agricultural development, and the economic independence of civil society from both state and foreign patronage may be more consequential for democratic durability than any number of electoral assistance programs. Moore's ghosts, in short, continue to haunt the Indonesian political landscape, and scholarly work that takes these structural legacies seriously performs an indispensable service for a field too often seduced by institutional formalism.