In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which 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 English Socialism of Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism of Eurasia, and Death-Worship of Eastasia.
Sourcing
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. Nothing is illegal; social pressure is used to exert control, in place of law. 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. In Oceania, to think is to do and no distinction is drawn between either. 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. 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 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 state's national anthem is Oceania, 'Tis for Thee. The official language of Oceania is Newspeak. The official currency of Oceania is the dollar; in Airstrip One, the pound sterling has been demonetised.
Eurasia
Eurasia comprises "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait". Eurasia was formed after the Soviet Union annexed continental Europe following a war between the Soviet Union and the Allies. The ideology of Eurasia is described as "Neo-Bolshevism."
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 called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, alternatively known as Obliteration of the Self. Eastasia was formed a decade after Eurasia and Oceania in the 1960s, after "confused fighting" between its predecessor nations.
International relations The three states have been at war with each other since the 1960s. By 1984 it has become a constant, and they regularly change allegiance with one another. 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.The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Chapter III: "War Is Peace". 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. The peoples of these states—subject to shortages, queues, poor infrastructure and food—"are no longer domesticated or even able to be domesticated", says Carr.
These states all are similar monolithic regimes. 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". Due to the sheer size of the protagonists, there are, says Connelly, no "massive invasions claiming hundreds of thousands of lives", but instead small-scale, local encounters and conflicts which are then exaggerated for the purposes of domestic propaganda. Connelly describes the fighting between the states as "highly technical, involving small units of highly trained individuals waging battles in remote contested regions". All sides once possessed nuclear weapons, but, following a short-lived resort to them in the 1950s (in which Colchester was hit) 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.
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. 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". These wars, suggests the writer Roberta Kalechofsky, "stimulate the news or 'the truth.
Analysis
The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four are recognisably based in the world Orwell and his contemporaries knew while being distorted into a dystopia. The critic Alok Rai argues that Oceania, for example, "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, though political scientist Craig L. Carr argues that they are also places where "things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong".
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; 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.
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