Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some nations traverse the path toward stable democratic governance while others slide into authoritarian entrenchment has animated comparative political science for decades, yet it remains as urgent as ever in the current global conjuncture. Across Southeast Asia, democratic backsliding has accelerated, with Freedom House and V-Dem indices registering sustained erosion in civic space, electoral integrity, and judicial independence throughout the region. Against this backdrop, a revisitation of Indonesia through the theoretical lens of Barrington Moore's foundational 1966 work, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," is both intellectually timely and analytically productive. Indonesia's twentieth-century trajectory — from colonial subordination through guided democracy, to military authoritarianism, and eventually to the democratic opening of 1998 — offers one of the most complex and instructive case studies available to students of comparative politics. The article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia takes on the formidable task of interrogating whether Moore's structural framework retains explanatory purchase when applied to a society whose agrarian configurations, colonial legacies, and class formations differ substantially from the European and Asian cases Moore originally examined.
Barrington Moore's central thesis rested on the observation that the political character of modernity — democratic, fascist, or communist — was shaped by the class alliances forged during the commercialization of agriculture and the transition away from feudal relations. His memorable formulation, "no bourgeois, no democracy," encapsulated the argument that a strong, independent commercial and industrial bourgeoisie capable of challenging landed aristocratic power was a necessary precondition for liberal democratic outcomes. Where landlord classes retained dominance and repressed peasant autonomy through labor-coercive agriculture, the conditions for fascism or communism were laid. Applied to Indonesia, this framework generates immediate analytical tensions. The Dutch colonial economy created a peculiar class structure: a plantation-dominated export economy that stunted indigenous bourgeois development, a priyayi administrative class that served as intermediaries between colonial power and the Javanese peasantry, and an urban commercial sector dominated by Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneurs whose political incorporation was perpetually ambivalent and contested. The article appears to probe how these colonial distortions of class formation shaped the structural conditions that made Indonesia's New Order possible and, paradoxically, how those same structural contradictions eventually contributed to its unraveling in 1998.
The 1965 conjuncture is pivotal to any Moorean analysis of Indonesia, and the article's engagement with this episode likely constitutes one of its analytical cores. The destruction of the PKI — the Indonesian Communist Party, then one of the world's largest communist parties — along with the mass killings of between five hundred thousand and one million people, represented a violent suppression of organized peasant politics of a kind that Moore identified as foreclosing certain developmental pathways. Suharto's New Order erected a form of developmental authoritarianism that demobilized civil society, subordinated organized labor and peasant associations to state corporatist structures, and channeled economic growth through a military-linked crony capitalist network. Yet the New Order also inadvertently cultivated the social forces that would contest it: a growing urban middle class, an expanding educated professional stratum, and a Muslim civil society that retained organizational capacities the state could not fully absorb. When the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98 collapsed the economic legitimacy that had sustained the regime's social contract, these latent structural forces coalesced into the Reformasi movement. The article's contribution lies, at least in part, in assessing whether this transition can be read as a delayed realization of Moore's bourgeois democratic pathway — delayed and distorted by colonialism, authoritarianism, and the violent suppression of the left — or whether Indonesia's democratization represents a genuinely different causal pathway that Moore's framework fails to anticipate.
The broader significance of this analysis for practitioners and scholars engaged in development policy and civil society strengthening is considerable. Indonesia's post-1998 democratic experience has been studied as a potential model for Muslim-majority democratic consolidation, and it has attracted substantial ODA investment in governance, rule of law, and civil society capacity. Yet the structural conditions that Moore's framework highlights — the persistence of oligarchic economic power, the continued political weight of military-linked business networks, the fragility of autonomous peasant and labor organization — suggest that democratic forms can coexist with deep structural impediments to genuine popular sovereignty. The rise of Prabowo Subianto to the presidency in 2024, with his background in the special forces and his family connection to the Suharto era, has reignited scholarly and policy debates about whether Indonesia's democratic consolidation is as robust as optimists claimed. Moore's framework, as applied through this article, provides a structural register in which to situate these anxieties: it prompts us to ask not merely whether elections are held, but whether the underlying class configurations and power distributions have shifted sufficiently to sustain democratic governance against authoritarian regression.
For researchers working on comparative democratization and for development practitioners calibrating civil society support programs, the article's intervention points toward several productive directions. First, it underscores the importance of attending to the structural rather than merely institutional dimensions of democratic sustainability — electoral procedures and constitutional architecture matter, but so do property relations, the autonomy of civil organizations from state and oligarchic capture, and the distributional character of economic growth. Second, it raises questions about the analytical transferability of frameworks developed from Western European historical experience to Southeast Asian contexts where colonial disruption, compressed industrialization, and the Cold War's violent interventions have produced configurations that are not merely variations on a universal developmental template. Indonesia's trajectory suggests that pathways to democracy can be multiple, contingent, and reversible in ways that Moore's more deterministic schema does not fully accommodate. Whether the current article advances a genuine modification of Moore's framework or argues for its continued relevance with appropriate contextual qualification will determine its lasting contribution to a literature that remains indispensable for anyone seeking to understand why some societies sustain democratic governance and others do not.