Political geography of Nineteen Eighty-Four

career influenced his creation of Oceania What is known of the society, politics and economics of Oceania, and its rivals, comes from the in-universe book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, a literary device Orwell uses to connect the past and present of 1984. Orwell intended Goldstein's book to parody Trotsky's (on whom Goldstein is based) The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, published in 1937. Within the novel, the copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism read by Winston is later shown to have been written by members of The Party, meaning that any information within is of doubtful veracity (such as the amount of territory ruled by each state and the nature of their regimes). ==Descriptions==

Oceania Oceania was founded following an anti-capitalist revolution, which, while intended to be the ultimate liberation of its proletariat (proles), soon ignored them. 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. The state is composed of "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa". Oceania's political system, Ingsoc, uses a cult of personality to venerate the ruler, Big Brother, as the Inner Party exercises day-to-day power. Food rationing, which does not affect Inner Party members, is in place. Winston considers the geography as now stands: The countryside outside of London is noted not as a place for enjoying the contrast with the city but rather for use as a purely practical grounds of exercise. Oceania is made up of provinces. The province of "Airstrip One" is "miserable and run-down" with London consisting almost solely of "decaying suburbs". It 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. 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. According to political scientist Craig Carr, Winston yearns for revolution and a return to a time before Oceania, 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." A totalitarian and highly formalised state, Oceania also has no law, only crimes, says Lynskey. 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. 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). 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". The state's national anthem is ''Oceania, 'Tis for Thee''. All three states consist primarily of proles. 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." 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. Each state recognises that science is responsible for its over-production, so science must be carefully controlled lest the proles or Outer Party expect an increased standard of living. From this analysis stems the policy of permanent warfare: by focusing production on arms and materiel (rather than consumer goods) each state can keep its population impoverished and willing to sacrifice personal liberties for the greater good. These states all are similar monolithic regimes. 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. 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". 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". ==Analysis==

alliances depicted on a world map for 1953, shortly after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four are recognisably based in the world Orwell and his contemporaries knew while being distorted into a dystopia. Each state is self-supporting and self-enclosed: emigration and immigration are forbidden, as is international trade and the learning of foreign languages. 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". The reader is told, through Winston, that the world has not always been this way, and indeed, once was much better; 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: 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. Scholar Christopher Behrends has commented that the proliferation of US airbases in Great Britain in the 1980s echoes Orwell's classification of the country as an airbase into the European theatre. Similarly, in 2007, the UK Independence Party group in the European Parliament alleged to the UK's House of Commons' European Scrutiny Committee that the European Commission's stated aim to make Europe a "World Partner" should be taken to read "Europe as a World Power!", and likened it to Orwell's Eurasia. The group also suggested that the germ of Orwell's superstates could already be found in organisations such as not only the EU, but ASEAN and FTAA. Further, the group suggested that the long wars then being waged by American forces against enemies they helped originally create, such as in Baluchistan, were also signs of a germinal 1984-style superstate. Lynskey writes how, in 1949, while Orwell was ill but Nineteen Eighty-Four complete, "the post-war order took shape. In April, a dozen Western nations formed NATO. In August, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first atom bomb in the Kazakh Steppe. In October, Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China ... Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia." Rai suggests that Oceania, with its labyrinthine bureaucracy, was comparable to the post-war Labour government, which found itself in control of what he terms the "extensive apparatus of economic direction and control" that had been set up to regulate supply at the beginning of the Second World War. According to Rai, London, as described by Winston, is also a perfect match for the post-war city: Critic Irving Howe argues that, since then, other events and countries—North Korea, for example—have demonstrated how close Oceania can be. Lynskey suggests that Oceania's anthem, "Oceania, Tis For Thee", is a direct reference to the United States (from "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)"), as is also, he suggests, the use of the dollar sign as the Oceanian currency denominator. ==Influences==

The totalitarian states of Nineteen Eighty-Four, although imaginary, were based partly on the real-life regimes of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Both regimes used techniques and tactics that Orwell later utilised in his novel: the re-writing of history, the cult of leadership personality, purges and show-trials, for example. The author Czesław Miłosz commented that, in his depictions of Oceanian society, "even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who has never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of Russian life". From a purely literary standpoint, suggests Julian Symons, the superstates of 1984 represent points along a path that also took Orwell from Burma to Catalonia, Spain, and to Wigan in England. Symons argues that, in each location, characters are similarly confined within a "tightly controlled, taboo-ridden" society, and are as suffocated by them as Winston is in Airstrip One. In The Road to Wigan Pier, for example, Orwell examines working-class life in detail; the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston observes a prole woman hanging out her washing echoes the earlier book, where Orwell watches a woman, in the back area of a slum dwelling, attempting to clear a drain pipe with a stick. Orwell's own wartime role in the UK 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. Orwell noted privately at the time that he could see totalitarian possibilities for the BBC that he would later provide for Oceania. Lynskey argues that, similarly, during World War II, Orwell had to make pro-Soviet broadcasts lauding Britain's ally. After the war—but with a cold war looming—this became an image that needed to be swiftly discarded, and is, according to Lynskey, the historical origin of Oceania's in its alliance during Hate Week. ==Comparisons==

The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been compared by literary scholars to other dystopian societies such as those created by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Franz Kafka's The Trial, B. F. Skinner's Walden Two and Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, although Orwell's bleak 1940s-style London differs fundamentally from Huxley's world of extensive technical progression or Zamyatin's science- and logic-based society. , in his 2019 history book The Ministry of Truth, also suggests that "equality and scientific progress, so crucial to We, have no place in Orwell's static, hierarchical dictatorship; organised deceit, so fundamental to Nineteen Eighty-Four, did not preoccupy Zamyatin". ==Sources==