Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory over the past six decades offers one of the most consequential test cases for theories of regime change in the developing world, and it is precisely this significance that animates a new contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisiting Barrington Moore's classic thesis on the social origins of dictatorship and democracy. At a moment when democratic backsliding has become a defining feature of global politics — from Hungary to the Philippines to India — and when Indonesia itself is often held up as Southeast Asia's most durable electoral democracy even as it exhibits troubling signs of oligarchic entrenchment and creeping illiberalism under recent administrations, the question of which historical class coalitions and agrarian structures produce durable democratic outcomes versus authoritarian ones has never been more pressing. Moore's 1966 landmark, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the character of a country's transition to modernity — bourgeois-democratic, reactionary-fascist, or peasant-communist — was determined chiefly by the relative strength of the landed aristocracy, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry, and by the particular coalitions these classes formed with the state. Applying this framework to Indonesia, a case Moore himself did not treat, forces scholars to confront both the analytical power and the limits of a model built almost entirely on European, American, Chinese, and Japanese experience.
The article's core contribution lies in demonstrating how Indonesia's twentieth-century path diverges from, yet remains illuminated by, Moore's typology. Unlike the English or French cases where an ascendant commercial bourgeoisie allied with segments of the gentry to check royal and aristocratic power, Indonesia's colonial economy under Dutch rule produced a weak, ethnically fragmented indigenous bourgeoisie subordinated to foreign capital and a small commercial class dominated by Chinese-Indonesian intermediaries who were structurally excluded from formal political power. This meant that no analog to Moore's bourgeois-revolutionary coalition ever cohered around the demand for parliamentary constraints on executive authority. Instead, the article traces how the vacuum left by a weak bourgeoisie was filled first by a nationalist intelligentsia and later, decisively, by the military as an autonomous political-economic actor — a pattern that echoes Moore's "revolution from above" pathway associated with Meiji Japan and Prussia more than it does the classical liberal route. The 1965-66 mass violence and the consolidation of Suharto's New Order can thus be read, through this lens, as a reactionary coalition of the military, remnants of the landed and commercial elite, and international capital moving to preempt a peasant-based mobilization led by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) — a dynamic structurally similar to the fascist pathway Moore identified in interwar Germany and Japan, where an insecure elite bloc turned to authoritarian repression precisely because it lacked the social weight to win an open political contest.
This reframing carries substantial implications for how scholars understand civil society and agrarian political economy across the wider Southeast Asian and Global South context. Moore's insistence that "no bourgeoisie, no democracy" has long been criticized for underplaying the agency of labor movements, peasant organizations, and, in more contemporary scholarship, transnational civil society and donor-driven democracy promotion. The Indonesian case usefully complicates the thesis further by showing that democratization, when it did arrive in 1998, was not driven by a resurgent bourgeoisie asserting constitutional limits on the state, but by a convergence of student movements, an economically battered middle class produced by the Asian Financial Crisis, and fracturing elite coalitions within the military and Golkar apparatus itself. This suggests that in late-developing states integrated into global capital markets, the class coalitions Moore identified as necessary preconditions for democracy may be substituted or supplemented by crisis-induced elite defection and civil society mobilization operating under very different structural conditions than nineteenth-century Europe. For ODA and development practitioners, this matters enormously: it implies that democracy-support programming premised on cultivating an independent business class as a bulwark against authoritarianism may misread the actual mechanisms of regime change in contexts like Indonesia, where oligarchic capital has historically been just as comfortable underwriting authoritarian stability as it has been in enabling pluralist competition.
The policy and research significance of this reassessment extends well beyond Indonesian historiography. As comparative political economists increasingly grapple with hybrid regimes and "electoral authoritarianism" across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and parts of Africa, Moore-inspired class-structural analysis offers a corrective to institutionalist accounts that treat elections, constitutions, or civil society density as sufficient markers of democratic consolidation while ignoring the underlying distribution of economic power. Indonesia's post-Suharto trajectory — marked by decentralization, a vibrant press, and competitive elections existing alongside persistent oligarchic control over party financing, land, and resource extraction — exemplifies precisely the kind of formally democratic but substantively constrained order that a class-based analysis anticipates rather than treats as anomalous. This has direct bearing on how development institutions and civil society funders calibrate governance and rule-of-law interventions: programs that strengthen electoral machinery without addressing land tenure inequality, conglomerate concentration, or military business interests may produce procedural democracy that remains structurally vulnerable to reversal, as the erosion of anti-corruption institutions and civil liberties protections in Indonesia over the past decade has already begun to demonstrate.
Looking forward, this line of inquiry invites researchers to extend comparative-historical class analysis to other Southeast Asian trajectories — Thailand's oscillation between military and elected governments, the Philippines' persistent landed-oligarchic dominance, Myanmar's aborted transition — using Indonesia as a methodological bridge between Moore's mid-century European and Asian cases and the contemporary political economy of globalized, donor-influenced developing states. For practitioners in the ODA and civil-society-support fields, the enduring lesson is that democratic durability cannot be engineered through institutional design alone; it requires sustained attention to who controls land, capital, and coercive force, and to which coalitions among these actors are being strengthened or weakened by aid, investment, and governance reform. As Indonesia approaches future electoral cycles under continued oligarchic and military-adjacent influence, this Moore-inflected analysis offers both a warning and a research agenda: the social foundations of any regime, not merely its formal architecture, remain the decisive variable in determining whether pathways lead toward genuine democratic deepening or toward increasingly sophisticated forms of authoritarian resilience.