Political geography of Nineteen Eighty-Four
In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, who are all fighting each other in a perpetual war in a disputed area mostly located around the equator. All that Oceania's citizens know about the world is whatever the Party wants them to know, so how the world evolved into the three states is unknown; and it is also unknown to the reader whether they actually exist in the novel's reality, or whether they are a storyline invented by the Party to advance social control. The nations appear to have emerged from nuclear warfare and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945 and 1965, in a post-war world where totalitarianism becomes the predominant form of ideology, through Neo-Bolshevism, English Socialism, and Obliteration of the Self.
Sourcing
What is known of the society, politics and economics of Oceania, and its rivals, comes from the
Descriptions
Oceania
Oceania was founded following an anti-capitalist revolution,[4] which, while intended to be the ultimate liberation of its proletariat (proles), soon ignored them.[5] It is stated that Oceania formed after the United States merged with the British Empire. The text, however, does not indicate how the Party obtained the power it possesses or when it did so.[6] The state is composed of "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa".[7] Oceania's political system, Ingsoc (English Socialism),[8] uses a cult of personality to venerate the ruler, Big Brother, as the Inner Party exercises day-to-day power.[9]
Food rationing, which does not affect Inner Party members, is in place. Winston considers the geography as now stands:
[E]ven the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.[10]
The countryside outside of London is a place not for enjoying the contrast with the city but rather for purely practical grounds of exercise.[11]
Oceania is made up by provinces, one of which is "Airstrip One", as Britain is now known. The whole province is "miserable and run-down"[8] with London consisting almost solely of "decaying suburbs".[12] Airstrip One is the third most populous province in Oceania, but London is not the capital, for Oceania has none. This decentralisation enables the Party to ensure that each province of Oceania feels itself to be the centre of affairs, and it prevents them from feeling colonised, for there is no distant capital to focus discontent on.[13] 85% of Oceania's population are proles, with most of the remainder presumably in the Outer Party; 2% rule as members of the Inner Party. Winston yearns for revolution and a return to a time before Oceania, says Craig L. Carr, but "no revolution is possible in Oceania. History, in Hegelian terms, has ended. There will be no political transformations in Oceania: political change has ended because Big Brother will not let it happen". No political collapse is possible in Oceania, suggests Carr.[14]
A totalitarian and highly formalised state, Oceania also has no law,[15] only crimes, says Lynskey.[6] Nothing is illegal; social pressure is used to exert control, in place of law.[16] It is hard for citizens to know when they are in breach of Party expectations; and they are in a state of permanent anxiety, unable to think too deeply on any subject whatsoever so as to avoid "thoughtcrime". For example, Winston begins to write a diary and does not know if this is a forbidden offence, but he is reasonably certain of it.[15] In Oceania, to think is to do and no distinction is drawn between either.[6] Criticism of the state is forbidden, even though criticism must be constant for the state's survival, since it must have critics to destroy so as to demonstrate the state's power.[17] Governance of Oceania depends upon the necessity of suppressing freedom of thought or original thinking amongst the Outer Party (the proles are exempted from this as they are deemed incapable of having ideas).[18]
The state is highly bureaucratic. Winston notes that myriad committees are responsible for administration and are "liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years".
Eurasia
Eurasia comprises "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait".[7] Eurasia was formed after the Soviet Union annexed continental Europe following a war between the Soviet Union and Allies. The ideology of Eurasia is Neo-Bolshevism.[4]
Eastasia
Eastasia consists of "China and the countries south to it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet". The state's ideology is known as Death-Worship, alternatively known as Obliteration of the Self.[4] Eastasia was formed a decade after Eurasia and Oceania in the 1960s, after "confused fighting" between its predecessor nations.[7]
International relations
The three states have been at war with each other since the 1960s.[7] By 1984 it has become a constant, and they regularly change allegiance with one another.[9] The perpetual conflict among Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia takes place over a large disputed area, bordering the three states, which includes Northern and Central Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian boundary, the Arctic ice pack and the islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. The majority of the disputed territories form "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong", containing about a fifth of the population of the Earth: whichever power controls it disposes of a significant amount of exploitable manpower.[20] All three states consist primarily of proles.[21] Winston recognises similarities with the other superstates, at one point commenting that "it was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, In Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were very much the same."[22]
Each state is self-supporting so they do not war over natural resources, nor is the destruction of the opponent the primary objective; for, even when two states ally against the third, no combination is powerful enough to do so.
These states all are similar monolithic regimes.[8] Historian Mark Connelly notes that "the beliefs may differ, but their purpose is the same, to justify and maintain the unquestioned leadership of a totalitarian elite".[7] Due to the sheer size of the protagonists, there are, says Connelly, no "massive invasions claiming hundreds of thousands of lives",[23] but instead small-scale, local encounters and conflicts which are then exaggerated for the purposes of domestic propaganda.[8] Connelly describes the fighting between the states as "highly technical, involving small units of highly trained individuals waging battles in remote contested regions".[23] All sides once possessed nuclear weapons, but, following a short-lived resort to them in the 1950s (in which Colchester was hit)[29] they were recognised as too dangerous for any of them to use. As a result, says Connelly, although London could have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon in 1984, it was never hit by anything worse—albeit "20 or 30 times a week"—than "rocketbombs", themselves no more powerful than the V-1s or V-2s of World War Two.[23]
At any moment, however, an alliance could shift and the two states that had previously been at war with each other may suddenly ally against the other. When this happened, the past immediately had to be re-written—newspapers retyped, new photos glued over old—to provide continuity. In many cases that which contradicted the state was simply destroyed.[30] This occurs during Oceania's Hate Week, when it is announced that the state is at war with Eastasia and allied to Eurasia, despite the assembled crowd—including Winston and Julia—having just witnessed the executions of Eurasian prisoners of war. Winston describes how, when the announcer spoke, "nothing altered in his voice or manner or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different".[31] Orwell describes the war as one of "limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference".[21] These wars, suggests the writer Roberta Kalechofsky, "stimulate the news or 'the truth'".[32]
Analysis
The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four are recognisably based in the world Orwell and his contemporaries knew while being distorted into a dystopia.[9] Oceania for example, argues the critic Alok Rai, "is a known country", because, while a totalitarian regime set in an alternate reality, that reality is still recognisable to the reader. The state of Oceania comprises concepts, phrases and attitudes that have been recycled—"endlessly drawn upon"—ever since the book was published.[17] They are also though, argues the political scientist Craig L. Carr, places where "things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong".[33]
Each state is self-supporting and self-enclosed: emigration and immigration are forbidden, as are international trade[34] and the learning of foreign languages.[35] Julia suspects that the war exists for the Party's sake, questioning if it is taking place at all and theorizing that the rocketbombs striking London on a daily basis could have been launched by the Party itself "just to keep people frightened".[36]
The reader is told, through Winston, that the world has not always been this way, and indeed, once was much better;[9] on one occasion with Julia, she produces a bar of old-fashioned chocolate—the chocolate the Party issued tasted "like the smoke from a rubbish fire"—and it brought back childhood memories from before Oceania's creation.[37]
Craig Carr argues that, in creating Oceania and the other warring states, Orwell was not predicting the future, but warning of a possible future if things carried on as they did. In other words, it was also something which could be avoided. Carr continues:
It is altogether easy to pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four today, notice that the year that has come to symbolize the story is now long past, realize that Oceania is not with us, and answer Orwell's warning triumphantly by saying, "We didn't!' It is easy, in other words, to suppose that the threat Orwell imagined and the political danger he foresaw have passed.[38]
Contemporary interpretations
Economist Christopher Dent argued in 2002 that Orwell's vision of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia "turned out to be only partially true. Many of the post-war totalitarian states have toppled, but a tripolar division of global economic and political power is certainly apparent". That is divided, he suggested, between Europe, the United States and Japan.
Similarly, in 2007, giving evidence to the UK's
The campaign associated with the allegations about domestic communism in post-war America, known as
He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses.[43]
In a review of the book in 1950, Symons notes that the gritty, uncomfortable world of Oceania was very familiar to Orwell's readers: the plain food, milkless tea and harsh alcohol were the staples of wartime rationing which, in many cases, had continued after the war.
Influences
The totalitarian states of Nineteen Eighty-Four, although imaginary, were based partly on the real-life regimes of
Orwell's own wartime role in the Ministry of Information saw him, says Rai, "experience at first hand the official manipulation of the flow of information, ironically, in the service of 'democracy' against 'totalitarianism'". He noted privately at the time that he could see totalitarian possibilities for the BBC that he would later provide for Oceania.[17] Similarly, argues Lynskey, during the war Orwell had to make pro-Soviet broadcasts, lauding Britain's ally. After the war—but with a cold one looming—this became an image that needed swiftly to be discarded, and is, comments Lynskey, the historical origin of Oceania's bouleversement in its alliance during Hate Week.[6]
Comparisons
The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been compared by literary scholars to other dystopian societies such as those created by
Sources
- ^ Slater 2003, p. 243
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- ^ ISBN 978-1-5275-2405-7.
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- ^ ISBN 978-1-5098-9076-7.
- ^ a b c d e f Connelly 2018, pp. 140ff
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- ^ Howe 1977, p. 198
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- ^ a b Kalelioğlu 2019, p. 112
- ^ Howe 1977, p. 32
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- ^ Connelly 2018, pp. 128
- ^ a b Slater 2003, p. 11
- ^ Slater 2003, p. 214
- ^ Carr 2010, pp. 7
- ^ Kalechofsky 1973, p. 115
- ^ Connelly 2018, pp. 129
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- ^ Slater 2003, p. 207
- ^ Kalechofsky 1973, p. 116
- ^ a b Carr 2010, pp. 3
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- ^ Howe 1977, p. 30
- ^ Kalelioğlu 2019, p. 102
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- ^ Carr 2010, pp. 6
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- ^ Hildebrand, James L. (1973). "Complexity Analysis: A Preliminary Step Toward a General Systems Theory of International Law". Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law. 3 (271): 284.
- ^ House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee: The European Commission's Annual Policy Strategy 2008 (Thirty-second Report of Session2006–07), vol. II: Oral and written evidence. Evs 28/2.5, 34/2.5.
- ^ Slater 2003, p. 215
- ^ Orwell 2013, p. 7
- ^ Howe 1977, p. 4
- ^ a b Howe 1977, p. 6
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- ^ Howe 1977, p. 22
- ^ Susser, D. (2015). Hermeneutic Privacy: On Identity, Agency, and Information. Stony Brook University PhD. p. 67.
- ^ Eslick, Leonard J. (1971). "The Republic Revisited: The Dilemma of Liberty and Authority". World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research. 10 (3–4): 171–212, 178.
- ^ Howe 1977, p. 43