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.

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.

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.

[7] Oceania's political system, Ingsoc (English Socialism, a parody of the British socialist Fabian Society, founded in London in 1884),[8] uses a cult of personality to venerate the ruler, Big Brother, as the Inner Party exercises day-to-day power.

[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".

[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).

[17] The rulers of Oceania, the Inner Party, says Winston, were once the intelligentsia, the "bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians".

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.

[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.

[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".

The state of Oceania comprises concepts, phrases and attitudes that have been recycled—"endlessly drawn upon"—ever since the book was published,[17] though political scientist Craig L. Carr argues that they are also places where "things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong".

[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.

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!'

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.

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?

[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.

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".

[17] 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 Wigan in England.

After the war—but with the cold war looming—this became an image that needed to be swiftly discarded, and is, according to Lynskey, the historical origin of Oceania's bouleversement in its alliance during Hate Week.

[6] 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,[48] B. F. Skinner's Walden II[49] and Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange,[50] 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.

[33] Dorian Lynskey, 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".