[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies arrive at durable democracy, entrenched authoritarianism, or something unstably in between remains as pressing today as when Barrington Moore first posed it in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy over half a century ago. In an era when Southeast Asia's democracies are under visible strain — Thailand's cyclical coups, the Philippines' populist authoritarianism, Myanmar's reversion to military rule, and Indonesia's own recent debates over civil-military relations and dynastic politics — revisiting Moore's structural framework through the specific case of Indonesia offers more than historical retrospection. It provides a lens for understanding why some post-colonial states consolidated competitive politics while others slid toward centralized control, and why Indonesia itself has followed a winding rather than linear trajectory from Dutch colonial rule through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, Suharto's New Order authoritarianism, and the post-1998 reformasi period that produced Southeast Asia's largest and, by many measures, most resilient democracy.
Moore's original thesis located the roots of political regime type in the class relations that accompanied the commercialization of agriculture: a strong, independent bourgeoisie allied against a landed aristocracy tended to produce liberal democracy, as in England and, with modifications, the United States and France; a landed elite that commercialized agriculture through repressive labor control while co-opting a weak bourgeoisie tended to produce fascism, as in Germany and Japan; and a landed class that failed to commercialize at all, leaving an unincorporated peasantry available for revolutionary mobilization, tended to produce communist revolution, as in Russia and China. Applying this schema to Indonesia is inherently difficult, and that difficulty is itself analytically productive. Indonesia's colonial political economy under the Dutch cultivation system and subsequent corporate plantation economy did not produce an indigenous landed aristocracy of the European type; instead it produced a layered structure in which colonial capital, an ethnic Chinese commercial class structurally excluded from political power, a fragmented indigenous priyayi bureaucratic elite, and a large, only partially proletarianized peasantry coexisted without any single class achieving the kind of hegemonic position Moore's European cases assume. The article's project of testing Moore against Indonesia therefore does useful work in exposing where the classical framework requires modification for late-developing, colonially structured societies — a task other scholars have similarly undertaken for cases such as India, South Korea, and Brazil.
What makes Indonesia especially generative for this exercise is the way political outcomes were shaped less by an organic bourgeois-landlord conflict than by the military's emergence as an autonomous political-economic actor, a factor largely absent from Moore's original typology, which was built on nineteenth-century European and Asian cases where standing armies were not independent class actors in their own right. The Indonesian National Armed Forces, through the doctrine of dwifungsi (dual function), positioned itself simultaneously as a security apparatus and a political-economic stakeholder with direct control over enterprises and territorial administration, effectively substituting for the landed class in Moore's model as the guarantor of a repressive-conservative coalition. Suharto's New Order, in this reading, resembles Moore's "reactionary coalition" route to authoritarianism less through landlord-bourgeois alliance and more through a military-bureaucratic-crony capitalist axis that suppressed peasant and labor mobilization (most violently in the 1965-66 mass killings that destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party and its rural base) while selectively incorporating Chinese-Indonesian capital and international investment. This suggests that any rigorous application of Moore to Southeast Asia must extend his three pathways to account for military-led developmental authoritarianism as a distinct route, one that has since been echoed in analyses of South Korea under Park Chung-hee and Thailand under successive military-royalist coalitions.
The 1998 transition complicates the picture further and is likely central to the article's argument, since Indonesia's shift to democracy did not follow the bourgeois-revolutionary script either. It was precipitated by the Asian Financial Crisis's rupture of the New Order's patronage economy, student and civil society mobilization, and elite defection rather than by the ascendance of an independent bourgeoisie demanding representative government. This matters enormously for how scholars and practitioners in the ODA and democracy-assistance community understand Indonesia's subsequent consolidation: civil society organizations, a free press, and decentralization reforms took root not because a Moore-style bourgeois class enforced them but because a contingent crisis opened space that reformist elites, NGOs, and a newly assertive middle class filled. This has implications for donor assumptions embedded in democracy-promotion programming across the region, much of which still implicitly presumes a Moore-style causal chain from economic liberalization to bourgeois class formation to democratic demand — an assumption that Indonesia's own history only partially supports and that appears increasingly strained in cases like Cambodia and Vietnam, where market liberalization has coexisted with durable one-party or hybrid authoritarian rule.
For researchers, the enduring value of returning to Moore through Indonesia lies in the demonstration that structural class analysis remains indispensable even where its specific European categories do not map cleanly onto post-colonial societies; the task is adaptation rather than abandonment. For practitioners in development and governance assistance, the lesson is a note of caution against path-dependent optimism: Indonesia's democracy, born of crisis rather than class consolidation, remains vulnerable to the same military-oligarchic-bureaucratic coalition that produced authoritarianism before, a concern visible in recent debates over the expanding political role of the Indonesian military under the current administration and over dynastic succession within its civilian elite. As Southeast Asia's democracies face simultaneous pressures from illiberal populism, Chinese economic influence, and domestic elite consolidation, Moore's structural question — which coalitions of class power sustain or destroy representative government — remains as urgent a diagnostic tool as it is a historically contingent one, and Indonesia continues to serve as one of the region's most instructive test cases for answering it.