Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-16
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies traverse the path toward durable democracy while others settle into authoritarian consolidation has animated comparative political sociology for decades. Few frameworks have proven as enduring or as contested as that offered by Barrington Moore Jr. in his 1966 magnum opus, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which traced the divergent political trajectories of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India through the structural transformations of agrarian capitalism and class formation. That a major scholarly journal would, in 2026, revisit Moore's framework through the lens of Indonesia speaks to the continued analytical purchase of historical-structural approaches — and to the specific urgency of understanding Indonesia's own turbulent passage through authoritarianism, democratic transition, and the uncertain terrain of contemporary democratic consolidation. At a moment when democratic backsliding has become a global preoccupation and when Southeast Asia in particular presents scholars with some of the most complex and theoretically challenging cases, this article arrives as both timely intervention and invitation to reconsider the intellectual scaffolding we use to interpret political change in the Global South.
Moore's central thesis, summarized in his celebrated aphorism that "no bourgeois, no democracy," situated the fate of political regimes in the nature of class coalitions forged during the commercialization of agriculture and early industrialization. Where a commercially oriented landed class allied with the modernizing state to suppress an independent bourgeoisie, fascist or conservative authoritarian outcomes followed — as in Germany and Japan. Where landlords were swept aside by a revolutionary peasantry under radical party direction, communist outcomes emerged — as in China and Russia. Only where a commercially autonomous bourgeoisie was sufficiently strong to check both the crown and the aristocracy, as in England, France, and the United States, did the institutional preconditions for parliamentary democracy take root. The application of this tripartite schema to postcolonial states in Asia has always been fraught with complications: the distortions of colonial extraction, the compression of historical time, the overlay of Cold War geopolitics, and the distinctive role of the military as an autonomous political actor all introduce variables that Moore's original framework was not designed to accommodate. Indonesia is an especially demanding test case precisely because its trajectory seems to defy easy categorization — it moved from colonial subjugation to nationalist revolutionary politics under Sukarno, lurched into one of the twentieth century's most violent episodes of anti-communist mass killing in 1965–66, consolidated an authoritarian developmental state under Suharto's New Order for more than three decades, and then, after the shock of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, underwent a democratic transition that surprised many observers who had considered Indonesian authoritarianism structurally entrenched.
The scholarship that has attempted to explain Indonesia's New Order and its subsequent unraveling has largely oscillated between elite-centered accounts emphasizing the personalistic logic of Suharto's patronage networks and structural accounts emphasizing the contradictions of dependent capitalist development. What Moore's framework potentially contributes is a deeper historical anchor — a way of asking not merely why the New Order fell when it did, but why authoritarian developmentalism took the particular form it took in Indonesia, and what structural preconditions were or were not in place when reformasi opened the space for democratic competition. The Indonesian agrarian structure, shaped by centuries of Dutch colonial cultivation systems, never produced the kind of independent rural gentry that Moore identified as crucial in the English case, nor the fully commercialized large-scale agriculture that tended to generate the repressive labor regimes Moore associated with authoritarian right-wing outcomes in Germany and the American South. Instead, Indonesia's rural landscape was characterized by smallholder rice cultivation, a dispersed and economically marginal peasantry, and a landed class whose political power was mediated through the colonial and then post-colonial state rather than exercised autonomously. This structural condition arguably left the field open for the military — the TNI and its predecessors — to step into the political vacuum that, in Moore's European cases, had been occupied by the landed upper class in its coalition with the centralizing state. The Indonesian bourgeoisie, moreover, was fragmented along ethnic lines, with ethnic Chinese capital playing a dominant commercial role while remaining politically subordinate and vulnerable, a configuration that neither generated the civic associational life Moore associated with English merchant and gentry classes nor produced the populist nationalist bourgeoisie that drove democratic breakthroughs elsewhere.
Against this structural backdrop, the Reformasi transition of 1998 and after presents a particular analytical puzzle. If the structural preconditions Moore associated with democratic outcomes were absent or attenuated in Indonesia, what drove democratization? Several intersecting factors appear relevant. First, the devastating impact of the Asian financial crisis on Suharto's developmental legitimacy exposed the brittleness of an authoritarian bargain that had rested on sustained economic growth and the co-optation of key social groups through patronage. Second, three decades of New Order development had inadvertently produced exactly the kind of urban middle class, educated professional strata, and organized civil society that Moore's framework, applied prospectively, might have anticipated as a democratizing force — students, NGO activists, labor organizers, and elements of the Islamic intellectual community who had cultivated autonomous social and institutional identities beneath the surface of authoritarian control. Third, the fragmentation of elite networks following the financial crisis created opportunities for reform-minded actors within the state and military itself to defect from the old coalition and align with pro-democracy movements. This confluence of structural transformation, crisis-induced elite fragmentation, and civil society mobilization suggests that Moore's framework, while not fully portable to the Indonesian context without significant modification, retains analytical relevance when applied dynamically — attending to the gradual accumulation of social structural change over decades rather than treating class configurations as fixed.
The policy and research implications of revisiting Moore through Indonesia extend well beyond the confines of area studies. For scholars of comparative democratization, the Indonesian case raises important questions about the relative weight of structural versus contingent factors in democratic transitions, and about the extent to which postcolonial states require their own theoretical frameworks rather than the adaptation of theories developed from European historical experience. For development practitioners and ODA institutions engaged in democracy promotion, Indonesia offers both cautionary lessons and grounds for qualified optimism: democratic institutions, once established, can develop resilience through the consolidation of electoral norms, judicial independence, and civil society capacity, even where the deep structural preconditions Moore identified were never fully met. At the same time, the vulnerabilities of Indonesian democracy — susceptibility to oligarchic capture, the political instrumentalization of religious identity, persistent civil-military tensions, and the recurrence of personalistic leadership styles — suggest that structural deficits do not disappear merely because formal democratic institutions are in place. Recent trends in Indonesian politics, including the consolidation of political dynasties, the erosion of competitive opposition, and the incorporation of former rivals into governing coalitions in ways that flatten meaningful ideological contestation, have prompted renewed scholarly concern about democratic quality even as procedural democratic forms are maintained.
Looking forward, the intellectual project of engaging Moore's framework with Indonesian realities opens onto broader questions about the comparative study of democracy in the Global South. As the third wave of democratization shows signs of exhaustion and as authoritarian or hybrid regimes proliferate, the temptation is to return to structural determinism — to conclude that democracy requires preconditions that many societies simply do not possess. A more productive reading of the Moore-Indonesia encounter may be that structural factors shape the probability distribution of political outcomes without determining them, and that the agency of social actors, the impact of transnational forces, and the historically contingent character of crises and coalitions can redirect trajectories that structural analysis might have predicted to run otherwise. For researchers at institutions focused on civil society development and global political economy, this points toward research agendas that attend simultaneously to long-run structural change, medium-term institutional dynamics, and the short-run politics of coalition and crisis. Indonesia, as one of the world's largest democracies and a society of extraordinary complexity, will continue to serve as an indispensable laboratory for these questions — demanding of its analysts both structural depth and sensitivity to the irreducible contingency of political life.