Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies move toward consolidated democracy while others slide into authoritarianism remains one of the central preoccupations of comparative political science. In an era marked by democratic backsliding across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Latin America, revisiting the foundational theoretical architecture of comparative historical sociology is not merely an academic exercise — it carries urgent practical implications for development practitioners, civil society advocates, and policy architects working in regions where democratic gains remain fragile and contested. The article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, enters this conversation with considerable analytical ambition, applying the theoretical scaffolding of Barrington Moore's landmark 1966 work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, to the Indonesian case. Indonesia's political trajectory — from colonial extraction to postcolonial authoritarianism, and from the Suharto New Order to the halting democratization of the Reformasi era — provides a richly textured empirical canvas on which to test, extend, and where necessary challenge Moore's original framework.
Barrington Moore's comparative historical sociology argued that the path a society takes toward political modernity is decisively shaped by the class alliances forged during the transition from agrarian to industrial economies. Moore identified three broad pathways: the bourgeois-democratic route, exemplified by England, France, and the United States, where a commercially oriented landowning class allied with an urban bourgeoisie to constrain royal and aristocratic power and eventually secure representative institutions; the fascist route, exemplified by Germany and Japan, where a weak bourgeoisie accommodated itself to authoritarian landlords and the state, producing a top-down modernization that channeled mass politics into nationalist repression; and the communist route, where peasant revolutions swept away the agrarian order entirely. Moore's famous dictum — "no bourgeois, no democracy" — encapsulated his structural determinism. The Indonesian case presents an especially demanding test for this framework, because Indonesia's class structure, colonial inheritance, and postcolonial statecraft do not map cleanly onto any of Moore's three routes. The Dutch colonial economy, built on the cultivation system and extractive plantation agriculture, suppressed the emergence of an indigenous landed bourgeoisie, while also fragmenting peasant solidarities across a vast archipelago. This structural legacy is essential context for understanding why the postcolonial state became the primary arena of accumulation and why military and bureaucratic elites, rather than a property-owning class, became the central political actors.
The article's engagement with Indonesia's specific historical trajectory from Sukarno's Guided Democracy through the catastrophic rupture of 1965 and into the three decades of Suharto's New Order illuminates both the utility and the limits of Moore's framework. The 1965 mass killings, in which an estimated half million to one million people — predominantly Communist Party members, sympathizers, and ethnic Chinese — were slaughtered following the murky coup and counter-coup of September 30, are widely understood as the founding violence of the New Order. What the Moorean lens adds to this analysis is an emphasis on the class and agrarian dimensions of that violence: in many parts of Java and Bali, the killings were not simply state repression from above but involved landowner and peasant conflicts over land reform that the Indonesian Communist Party had been mobilizing around. This local dimension of the 1965 violence, where struggles over tenancy, crop-sharing arrangements, and land redistribution intersected with Cold War geopolitics, resonates powerfully with Moore's insistence that the fate of the peasantry in the transition to modernity is never peripheral to political outcomes. The New Order that followed suppressed not only the left but depoliticized the peasantry systematically, channeling rural populations into depoliticized corporatist structures while directing the economic surplus of the green revolution toward a patronage system anchored in the military and the Golkar party apparatus.
The article's contribution is perhaps most significant in its treatment of Indonesia's democratic transition after 1998 — a transition that Moore's original framework, rooted in the early modern European and Asian cases, was never designed to explain. The Reformasi movement that overthrew Suharto emerged not from a propertied bourgeoisie in the classic sense, nor from a revolutionary peasantry, but from an urban middle class formed largely by the New Order's own developmental policies, augmented by student movements, Islamic civil society organizations, and a labor movement that had been clandestinely organizing through the 1990s. This coalition challenges Moore's structural determinism in productive ways. It suggests that the developmental state, even in its authoritarian form, can inadvertently generate the social forces that eventually contest its own legitimacy. The rapid expansion of Indonesian higher education, the growth of a professional class, and the deepening of urban consumer culture under Suharto created constituencies whose political aspirations could not be indefinitely managed through the controlled pluralism of the New Order's managed elections. What the article appears to argue, drawing on and extending Moore's method if not always his conclusions, is that Indonesia's democratization was not a triumph of bourgeois liberalism in the classical sense but a contingent achievement of a new class coalition whose democratic commitments were real but whose structural foundations remain contested.
For development practitioners and civil society researchers, the policy implications of this kind of historically grounded structural analysis are considerable. Indonesia is today the world's third-largest democracy by population, and its experience is frequently cited as evidence that Islam and democracy are compatible, that Southeast Asia is not condemned to authoritarian developmentalism, and that ODA can play a constructive role in democratic consolidation. These are important claims, but the Moorean framework cautions against reading democratic outcomes as the inevitable product of economic development or civil society programming alone. The structural conditions that enable democracy to take root and persist — the distribution of property rights, the balance of power between agrarian and urban classes, the degree to which military and bureaucratic elites are subordinated to civilian authority — are not easily reshaped by technical assistance or governance programs operating on short ODA project cycles. Indonesia's democratic quality has been undermined in recent years by the resurgence of oligarchic power, the instrumentalization of identity politics, and the accommodation of military interests within nominally democratic institutions. These dynamics are not aberrations from an otherwise healthy democratic trajectory; they reflect the unresolved structural tensions that Moore's framework would lead us to anticipate in a society where the class foundations of democratic governance remain ambiguous.
Looking forward, the theoretical conversation this article engages is unlikely to be resolved soon, either in the Indonesian case or in the broader comparative literature. The resurgence of interest in historical sociology and political economy across development studies, following decades in which liberal institutionalism and behavioralist approaches dominated, suggests a disciplinary reorientation toward structural questions of the kind Moore pioneered. For researchers working on civil society and democratization in Southeast Asia, the article's contribution is to remind us that the social bases of democratic politics are not simply a matter of organizational capacity, donor funding, or civic values — they are embedded in agrarian histories, colonial legacies, and class formations that shape the range of politically possible outcomes in ways that no amount of good governance programming can entirely override. For practitioners in ODA agencies and international development organizations, this is both a sobering and an energizing message: sobering because it underlines the limits of externally driven democratization, energizing because it directs attention toward the domestic structural conditions — land rights, labor organizing, anti-corruption enforcement, military accountability — that genuinely undergird democratic resilience. Indonesia remains, in this sense, a living laboratory for some of the deepest questions in comparative political development, and articles that bring rigorous historical-sociological analysis to bear on its contemporary trajectory perform an indispensable service for both scholarship and practice.