The Great Power Politics and the Second World War - Essay Example

? Essay How does the Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four anticipate social changes after WW2? George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is best characterized as a warning rather than a prediction. Essentially, Orwell’s novel cautions as to what the future might look like if the on-going trends persisted. Most of the on-going trends utmost in Orwell’s mind were advances in science and technology (Bloom 2004, p. 47). First published in 1949, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was written at a time when the outcome of the Second World War and communism were fresh and found expression in Orwell’s novel (Schneidereit 2007, p. 3). Characterized as dystopian fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four gives expression to the aftermath of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War by depicting a largely “impoverished world” (Booker and Thomas 2009, p. 193). In Orwell’s world, a harsh dictatorship has risen to power following a global nuclear war that occurred during the 1950s. Put in its proper context, this abrasive regime in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is particularly thought provoking because the novel is written when “memories of European Fascism were still fresh and anti-Stalinist rhetoric was on the rise” (Booker and Thomas 2009, p. 193). A major theme in Orwell’s novel is anti-totalitarianism. Reed and Spring (1984) maintain that Orwell wanted to demonstrate what can occur when governments are prescribed too much authority (p. 24). Ultimately, those self-empowered governments will take control to such an extent that is meant to ensure that their power is sustained (Reed and Spring 1984, p. 24). Orwell wastes little time introducing the extent of that power and its system of control. Through his protagonist Winston Smith who is a civil servant for the ruling dictatorship, the reader learns of the extent of the ruling dictatorship’s control. Winston thus observes as he climbs the seven flights of steps to his flat: On each landing opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran (Orwell 1961, pp.1-2). This poster is representative of the government’s warning that it was constantly watching and that any sign of revolt or opposition against the government would not go unchecked. Indeed it can be argued that Orwell predicted or forewarned with a reasonable degree of precision what would unfold in the future. Tinpots, as described by Wintrobe (2000) are governments that permit conventional ways of living, but uses repression and oppression in order to remain in power and “collect the fruits of monopolizing political power (p. 11). Latin American dictators typically epitomize this image of the tinpot regime (Wintrobe 2000, p. 11). In the aftermath of the Second World War, Latin American regimes have been characterized by economic growth and lulls and political instability facilitated by tumultuous outcries for democracies (Leonard 2006, p. 123). This political instability may be a direct reflection of Orwell’s forecast of totalitarian rule in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The drive to do all that is necessary to retain power by these kinds of regimes remains intricately connected to political unrest and instability. When power is centralized, maintaining power becomes a virtual struggle with the result that economic policies are not a priority. As Sloan (1984) puts it, in Latin America, policymakers are so determined to obtain legitimacy “or at least survival” that development suffers (p. 19). Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four however, forecasts Asia, rather than Latin America, as “a region dedicated to death worship and the obliteration of itself” (MacKinnon and Powell 2007, p. 86). This death knell however is not relegated to Asia alone in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s novel acknowledges that the world’s three super-states, Oceania (Britain, the Americas, South Africa, Polynesia and Australia), Eurasia (Europe and North Asia) and Eastasia (China, Korea, North India, Taiwan and Japan) each have a different political ideology. Oceania’s is Ingsoc, Eurasia’s is Neo-Bolshevism and Eastasia’s is death worship or obliteration of the self (Orwell 1961, p. 196). However, despite the names allocated to these ideologies, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four comes to the conclusion that they are nevertheless the same. The novel maintains that: Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare (Orwell 1961, p. 197). Orwell’s novel goes on to describe what is very much aligned to the balance of powers and the balance of fears that characterised much of the post-Second World War era under the auspices of the Cold War. Asian authoritarianism, unlike Latin America’s regimes, is able to retain power by virtue of its economic success. In this regard, Orwell’s big brother rhetoric is more closely reflected in the reality of Asia’s political success. While there have been periods of political unrest in the aftermath of the Second World War, authoritarianism manages to remain in control on the basis of nationalism and economic success. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four however, puts it a lot less delicately. According to Orwell’s novel: The rules of such a state are absolute, as the Pharoahs or the Ceasars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist into whatever shape they choose (Orwell 1961, p. 198). What Orwell describes then is not so much economic success and nationalism, but more specifically economic dependence and socialism. Authoritarianism or communism or totalitarianism fosters citizen dependency on the absolute ruler for protection from outside invaders and for economic subsistence. In Asia, and China more particularly, the regime has largely succeeded so that absolute rule is complete and the threat of political and social unrest has been minimized. In Latin America however, this is not the case as political and social unrest continues to undermine the success of authoritarian rule. Political and social unrest however is not specific to the government’s inability to ensure that its citizens have grown dependent on the government for protection and economic subsistence. Modern technological advances, another major them in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four also plays a role in political and social unrest. Huntington (2006) maintains that it is the relative speed with which modernization is introduced that cause political and social unrest. In Latin America in particular, modernization occurred overnight whereas in Europe, the US, the USSR and China, modernization developed over several hundred years therefore ensuring that change was not a social or political shock (Huntington 2006, p. 45). Nevertheless, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four offers a striking forecast of the position of the super powers, and more particularly the allies in the aftermath of the Second World War and more particularly the Cold War. This scenario also demonstrates how the political ideologies of the allies in the aftermath of the Second World War, were able to maintain control under the auspices of the Cold War. In this regard, the allies were able to ensure that their respective citizens were dependent on their governments for security and economic progress. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the world was divided among the Western powers and the Eastern bloc and other Communist powers supported by China. The USSR, an ally in the Second World War was caught up in the rivalry for world power and aligned itself with China forming the Eastern Bloc. In this regard, the super-states depicted by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four are closely aligned to the super powers in the aftermath of the Second World War. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four not only describes the Cold War, but also accounts for why the USSR, the US, the UK and Western Europe together with China have been able to develop technology and nuclear weapons. The following excerpt aptly defines the reality of the Cold War in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War: It follows that the three superstates not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory (Orwell 1961, p. 197). The Cold War was primarily based on a strategy that was founded on the concept of a balance of power or a balance of fear under the theme great power politics. Perceptions were that this balance of fear and power would ultimately keep the peace (Walzer 2006, p. 76). According to Spanier and Wendzel (1996) within this strategy of great power politics, any nation striving for world dominance or for simply protecting its borders and its citizens would have to ensure that it was a military threat (p. 108). Although Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four describes an actual and continuous war, the Cold War was not an actual war, but an arms’ race. This arms’ race was a perpetual competition predicated on the ongoing threat of war. Therefore, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a situation that is very close to the social and political changes that followed the Second World War. The power that came with the harvesting of nuclear power not only strengthened each great power, but insulated its citizens to a point where total dependence and subservience was possible. This was almost precisely anticipated by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four as follows: Since each of the three superstates is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced (Orwell 1961, p. 198). Looked at this way, the Thought Police might be seen as a symbolic representation of this thought control. In the US and Western Europe this kind of thought control is not obvious or direct. These controls have been manifested by intrusions into privacy under the auspices of the modern technology with wire-tapping and camera surveillances now thought to be necessary for the global war on terror. The fact is Orwell describes a political and technological world in which there was no reason to expect one’s privacy to be protected (Shattuck 1984, p. 991). In today’s world, the global war on terror has ensured that any reasonable expectation of privacy has been all but obliterated. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four eerily describes what many in the US know all too well today: There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment…it was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized (Orwell 1961, pp. 6-7). In other words, the Thought Police symbolizes a more indirect method of thought control in Western societies. Having convinced its citizens that their protection necessarily required they surrender some human rights, Western governments are now in a position to control freedom of information and freedom of expression by monitoring and by surveillance rather than by over repression and repercussions. The Thought Police are described in a way that directly resembles the secret police in the USSR and the tyrannical regimes in Latin America and Asia. The Thought Police are “Big Brother’s secret militia” and their primary function is to “help the Party quell any sign of revolt by eliminating all who think or behave in a disloyal fashion” (Orwell 1961, p. 7). The ultimate goal of the Cold War is therefore intricately found expression in the functioning of Big Brother, the Party and the Thought Police. These three institutions in Nineteen Eighty-Four functioned to ensure dependence for safety and security, economic existence and did so by controlling thoughts and conduct. These operations were all spearheaded by one goal and that goal was world dominance. World dominance however, meant that national and international policies were intimately linked. It necessarily involved insulation at home and the forming of allegiances abroad for political convenience. This point was not lost on Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the author writes: The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-times strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep (Orwell 1961, p. 195). George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four did not purport to see into the future. However, it did have a sound basis upon which to predict the future. The invention of the Atomic bomb, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the rise of authoritarianism, totalitarian and Nazism during the Second World War and the anti-totalitarianism among the US and its allies offered good indicators for the way that world politics would develop. Although Orwell created three super powers that were constantly shifting allies and espousing ideologies that were essentially the same, he nonetheless depicts a great deal of what would follow in the aftermath of the Second World War. The world would be divided into two factions rather than three. Each of these factions would amalgamate their own allies. The irony is that these two factions came from among the victorious allies in the Second World War. Be that as it may, the great power politics that followed the Second World War run parallel to the superstate depicted by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bibliography Bloom, H. George Orwell’s 1984. Infobase Publishing, 2004. Booker, M. and Thomas, A. The Science Fiction Handbook. Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Huntington, S. Political Order in Changing Societies. Yale University Press, 2006. Leonard, T. Encyclopedia of the Developing World, Vol. 1. Taylor and Francis, 2006. MacKinnon, A. and Powell, B. China Calling: A Foot in the Global Door. Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Orwell, G. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguin Books, 1961. Reed, K. and Spring, M. George Orwell’s 1984. Barron’s Educational Series, 1984. Schneidereit, G. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: Winston Smith’s Rebellion. GRIN Verlag, 2007. Shattuck, J. “In the Shadow of 1984 – National Identification Systems, Computer-Matching, and Privacy in the United States”. Hastings Law Journal, (1984) Vol. 35: 991-1005. Sloan, J. Public Policy in Latin America: A Comparative Survey. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. Spanier, J. and Wendzel, R. Games Nations Play. CQ Press, 1996. Walzer, M. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. Basic Books, 2006. Wintrobe, R. The Political Economy of Dictatorship. Cambridge University Press. Read More