Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia occupies an unusual place in comparative democratization studies: it is simultaneously one of the largest Muslim-majority democracies in the world, a middle-income economy still wrestling with entrenched oligarchic power, and a country whose post-1998 political trajectory has repeatedly confounded predictions drawn from classical modernization theory. At a moment when democratic backsliding is visible from Budapest to Manila, and when scholars are once again asking why some societies consolidate pluralist rule while others slide toward competitive authoritarianism, revisiting Barrington Moore's landmark 1966 thesis through the Indonesian case is more than an academic exercise in intellectual history. It is an attempt to test whether a framework built on English enclosures, French revolutionary upheaval, and Prussian Junker politics still has explanatory power in a Southeast Asian archipelago shaped by Dutch colonial extraction, Cold War geopolitics, and a resource-dependent developmental state. The article's engagement with Moore's "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" is therefore best read as part of a broader disciplinary reckoning: can macro-historical, class-based theories of regime change travel outside the North Atlantic cases that originally generated them, or do they require substantial retooling when applied to postcolonial Asia?
The core analytical move in applying Moore to Indonesia lies in identifying functional equivalents to his three classic pathways — the bourgeois-liberal route to democracy, the authoritarian "revolution from above" associated with fascism, and the peasant-based route to communist revolution. Indonesia fits none of these cleanly, which is precisely the point of productive friction the article exploits. Unlike Moore's English gentry or French bourgeoisie, Indonesia's commercial class emerged under colonial tutelage and was ethnically stratified, with indigenous pribumi elites largely excluded from capital accumulation until decades after independence. The landed aristocracy that might have played Moore's Junker role was comparatively weak and regionally fragmented, never consolidating into a national agrarian bloc capable of dictating terms to the state. Instead, the decisive coalition-formation in Indonesian history occurred through the military-bureaucratic apparatus that Suharto's New Order built after 1965-66, fusing state power with an emergent, patronage-dependent business class rather than resolving, in Moore's sense, a prior agrarian question through commercialized agriculture. The article's contribution, then, is to show that the mechanism Moore cared most about — how agrarian class relations get transformed by the pressures of commercialization, and who bears the political cost of that transformation — still operated in Indonesia, but through the state itself acting as the primary agent of class formation, redistributing land, licenses, and rents to construct a loyal bourgeoisie rather than negotiating with a preexisting one.
This reframing dovetails with an already substantial literature on Indonesian political economy, particularly the oligarchy scholarship associated with Richard Robison, Vedi Hadiz, and Jeffrey Winters, which has long argued that Indonesia's 1998 transition produced a procedural democracy without dismantling the material power of New Order-era oligarchs. Where Moore's framework predicts that a strong, independent bourgeoisie is a precondition for durable liberal democracy ("no bourgeoisie, no democracy," in Barrington Moore's famous formulation as later popularized by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens), Indonesia presents the inverse puzzle: democratization occurred not because a rising bourgeois class demanded political inclusion, but because the authoritarian coalition itself fractured amid the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, opening space for reformasi while leaving the oligarchic property structure largely intact. This is a crucial corrective to any mechanical application of Moore's typology across the region, and it resonates with comparative work on Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where democratic openings have similarly failed to produce the kind of bourgeois-led constitutional settlements Moore associated with England or the northern United States. The regional pattern that emerges is one of "oligarchic democracy" — competitive elections and formal civil liberties coexisting with concentrated economic power, captured regulatory institutions, and a civil society sector whose autonomy is frequently conditioned by dependence on foreign donor funding and ODA-linked governance programming.
For scholars and practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, this analysis carries direct policy relevance. Decades of donor-funded democracy assistance in Indonesia — supporting electoral commissions, anti-corruption bodies, and civil society watchdogs — were premised on an implicit modernization logic: that strengthening procedural institutions and a vibrant NGO sector would gradually generate the kind of autonomous middle-class and bourgeois pressure Moore's model treats as democracy's social foundation. The Indonesian case suggests this premise deserves scrutiny. If democratic consolidation depends less on procedural institution-building than on the underlying distribution of economic power between state, military, and capital, then civil society support programs that ignore land tenure, natural resource rents, and conglomerate ownership structures may be treating symptoms rather than the structural conditions Moore identified as decisive. This has implications for how development agencies and philanthropic funders in Jakarta, and across similarly oligarchic Southeast Asian polities, calibrate governance assistance: technical support for elections and anti-corruption enforcement is necessary but plausibly insufficient without attention to the class coalitions that determine whether reform survives elite capture.
Looking forward, the value of returning to Moore lies not in vindicating his specific typology but in recovering his comparative-historical method — the insistence on tracing regime outcomes to long-run transformations in class power rather than treating democracy or authoritarianism as products of institutional design or leadership choice alone. As Indonesia navigates a post-Jokowi political landscape marked by dynastic succession politics, a resurgent military role in civilian governance, and continued dependence on resource extraction, researchers would do well to ask not simply whether Indonesian democracy is "consolidating" but which coalitions currently hold the material power to make that outcome durable. For the ODA and civil society research community, the enduring lesson of a Moore-inflected reading of Indonesia is that democratic resilience is ultimately a question of political economy, and that programs aimed at strengthening civic space must be evaluated against the deeper structural question of who controls land, capital, and rents — the same question Barrington Moore posed six decades ago, and one that Southeast Asia's evolving oligarchies continue to make newly urgent.