Political geography of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Did You Know?

• Orwell intended Goldstein's book to parody Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, published in 1937.
• The superstates have been compared to societies in Brave New World, We, The Trial, Walden Two and A Clockwork Orange.
• 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.

Sourcing

Almost everything known about Oceania and its rivals comes from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a book by Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell used this fictional text to link the novel’s past and present. However, the copy Winston reads was actually written by Party members, making all its claims—including territorial sizes and regime details—highly unreliable.

Descriptions

Oceania came into being after an anti-capitalist revolution that was supposed to free the working class, but the proles were quickly cast aside. The state formed when the United States and the British Empire merged, though how the Party seized and holds power is never explained. Its territory includes the Americas, the Atlantic Islands (including the British Isles), Australasia, and the southern part of Africa. The political system is Ingsoc, built around a cult of personality for Big Brother, while the Inner Party runs daily affairs. Food is rationed, except for Inner Party members. The countryside near London is not for leisure but only for practical exercise. Oceania is divided into provinces. Airstrip One is a miserable, run-down province, and London itself is just decaying suburbs. It is the third most populous province, but Oceania has no capital. This lack of a central seat of power makes each province feel like the center, preventing any sense of colonization or a distant target for discontent. Eighty-five percent of the population are proles; most of the rest are in the Outer Party, and only two percent belong to the ruling Inner Party.

Analysis

The three superstates in Nineteen Eighty-Four are clearly drawn from the world Orwell lived in, but twisted into something nightmarish. Critic Alok Rai points out that Oceania feels like a known place, even though it is a totalitarian alternate reality, because its ideas, phrases, and attitudes have been endlessly reused since the book came out. Political scientist Craig L. Carr adds that these states are also places where things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong. Each superstate is completely self-sufficient and sealed off: no one can emigrate or immigrate, no international trade happens, and learning foreign languages is banned. Julia suspects the war only serves the Party, even wondering if it is real at all, and suggests the rocketbombs hitting London every day might be launched by the Party itself just to keep everyone scared. Through Winston, the reader learns the world was not always like this—it was once much better. Julia once produces an old-fashioned chocolate bar, unlike the Party’s version that tastes like smoke from a rubbish fire, and it brings back childhood memories from before Oceania existed. Carr argues Orwell was not trying to predict the future but to warn of one that could still be avoided. In 2002, economist Christopher Dent noted that Orwell’s vision was only partly right: many post-war totalitarian states have fallen, but a tripolar division of global economic and political power has emerged, split between Europe, the United States, and Japan. Legal scholar Wolfgang Friedmann observed that the rise of supra-state organizations like the Organisation of American States mirrors Orwell’s super-states, shifting power from many national states to a more massive and potentially more destructive balance between two or three superpower blocs.

Influences

Though the superpowers in Nineteen Eighty-Four are fictional, Orwell drew heavily on the actual regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Both real-world dictatorships relied on tactics Orwell wove into his novel: rewriting history, building a cult around a leader, and staging purges and show trials. Writer Czesław Miłosz noted that people familiar with Orwell only by reputation were astonished that someone who had never lived in Russia could capture Russian life so accurately. Literary critic Julian Symons saw the novel’s superstates as stations along a journey Orwell himself took, from Burma to Catalonia, Spain, and Wigan, England. In each place, Symons argued, characters are trapped inside a rigid, taboo-laden society, just as Winston is suffocated in Airstrip One. Orwell’s own work at the Ministry of Information during the war gave him direct experience of how officials could manipulate information, even in the name of democracy fighting totalitarianism. He privately noted that the BBC held totalitarian potential he would later assign to Oceania. According to Lynskey, Orwell also had to broadcast pro-Soviet propaganda during the war, praising an ally. Once the war ended and the Cold War began, that image had to be quickly abandoned—a shift Lynskey identifies as the real-world basis for Oceania’s sudden alliance change during Hate Week.