Eurovisions: Identity And The International Politics Of The Eurovision Song Contest Since 1956 9811394261, 9789811394263, 9789811394270

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
List of Contributors......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 9
List of Tables......Page 10
Introduction......Page 11
Identity and Integration in Europe......Page 12
The Eurovision Song Contest as an Element of European Integration......Page 17
Imagining Europe at Eurovision......Page 21
Conclusions......Page 26
References......Page 28
Chapter 2 Germany as Good European: National Atonement and Performing Europeanness in the Eurovision Song Contest......Page 31
Nationalism, National Identity and Vergangenheitsbewältigung [Mastering the Past]......Page 33
European Integration in the Cultural Sphere and Europeanising Germany......Page 35
Reinventing Germany in ESC as a Good European......Page 38
German Victory in ESC in 1982—Europe Affirms Germany as Good European......Page 42
German Victory in ESC in 2010: Germany as Good European or a German Europe?......Page 46
Conclusion......Page 51
References......Page 52
Introduction......Page 56
England’s Europe: A Continent for Losers......Page 57
Puppet on a String: Aspiring to Europe......Page 66
Brotherhood of Man: Britain and European Unity in the 1970s......Page 68
Making Your Mind Up: The Emergence of Eurosceptic England......Page 70
Nul Points: Towards English Disengagement......Page 74
Conclusions......Page 78
References......Page 79
Chapter 4 Which Belgium Won Eurovision? European Unity and Belgian Disunity......Page 82
The Making of Belgium......Page 87
Belgium Hosts Eurovision......Page 93
Conclusion......Page 96
References......Page 98
Introduction......Page 100
A Ritualised Contest and the Balkan Ethno Music Genre......Page 101
Yugoslavia and the Eurovision Song Contest, 1961–1991......Page 105
Bosnia-Herzegovina in the ESC......Page 109
Croatia in the ESC......Page 112
Serbia in the ESC......Page 113
Conclusion......Page 116
References......Page 117
Chapter 6 Recognising Kosovo in the World of Televised International Song Contests......Page 120
The Yugoslav Era......Page 122
An Independent Kosovo......Page 129
Conclusion......Page 134
References......Page 135
Introduction......Page 138
Ruslana: The Folkloric as Global......Page 141
Serduchka: Ambivalent About Culture, Decisive on Geopolitics......Page 144
Jamala: Minority Part for National Whole......Page 148
Conclusion: Envisioning the Culturally Multifaceted Nation......Page 153
References......Page 155
Introduction......Page 160
Culture in International Relations: Branding, Relations, and Diplomacy......Page 162
Understanding Australia’s Place at Eurovision (and in the World)......Page 165
Nation Branding at Eurovision: Postcards and Performances......Page 168
Cultural Relations at Eurovision: Fans as Agents of Vernacular Internationalism......Page 173
Diplomacy at Eurovision: Artist-Ambassadors......Page 175
Conclusion......Page 177
References......Page 178
Chapter 9 ‘If Love Was a Crime, We Would Be Criminals’: The Eurovision Song Contest and the Queer International Politics of Flags......Page 183
National Flags and Pride Flags in International Politics......Page 185
Eurovision and the Backstage Politics of Flags......Page 190
Rainbow Flags, Banned Flags and Other Contentions in Eurovision 2015–2016......Page 195
Conclusion......Page 201
References......Page 203
Chapter 10 Europe: Start Voting Now! Democracy, Participation and Diversity in the Eurovision Song Contest......Page 209
The Historical Development of the Eurovision Vote......Page 210
Eurovision’s Electoral System......Page 214
Towards Greater Popular Participation......Page 216
National Song Selection Processes......Page 220
Conclusion......Page 224
References......Page 225
Index......Page 228

Citation preview

Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956 Edited by Julie Kalman · Ben Wellings · Keshia Jacotine

Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956

Julie Kalman · Ben Wellings · Keshia Jacotine Editors

Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956

Editors Julie Kalman School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

Ben Wellings Politics and International Relations Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

Keshia Jacotine Politics and International Relations Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-13-9426-3 ISBN 978-981-13-9427-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © AllaBond/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To Yekira and Nitsan; the future of Eurovision fandom in Australia is in safe hands —Julie Kalman To Ria—I wish Dami had won too —Ben Wellings To my mother Shameena for telling me that I’d one day publish a book, to my father Warwick for introducing me to Eurovision, and to everyone who supported me along the way —Keshia Jacotine

Contents

1

Entangled Histories: Identity, Eurovision and European Integration 1 Ben Wellings and Julie Kalman

2

Germany as Good European: National Atonement and Performing Europeanness in the Eurovision Song Contest 21 Alison Lewis

3

‘Making Your Mind Up’: Britain, Europe and Eurovision-Scepticism 47 Ben Wellings, Zoë Jay and Catherine Strong

4

Which Belgium Won Eurovision? European Unity and Belgian Disunity 73 Julie Kalman

5

Negotiating Post-war Nationhood: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Eurovision Song Contest 91 Nina Markovic Khaze

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CONTENTS

6

Recognising Kosovo in the World of Televised International Song Contests 111 Dean Vuletic

7

Ruslana, Serduchka, Jamala: National Self-Imaging in Ukraine’s Eurovision Entries 129 Marko Pavlyshyn

8

Nation Branding, Cultural Relations and Cultural Diplomacy at Eurovision: Between Australia and Europe 151 Jess Carniel

9

‘If Love Was a Crime, We Would Be Criminals’: The Eurovision Song Contest and the Queer International Politics of Flags 175 Catherine Baker

10 Europe: Start Voting Now! Democracy, Participation and Diversity in the Eurovision Song Contest 201 Anika Gauja Index 221

List of Contributors

Catherine Baker  University of Hull, Hull, UK Jess Carniel University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia Anika Gauja  University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Zoë Jay  University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia Julie Kalman  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia Alison Lewis  The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Nina Markovic Khaze Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia Marko Pavlyshyn  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia Catherine Strong  RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Dean Vuletic  University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Ben Wellings  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

UK placings at the Eurovision Song Contest 1958–2018, normalised. Placements are normalised to a percentage/place out of 100 to account for different numbers of competitors each year affecting the relative position of some placings (Source Compiled by Zoë Jay) 56 Fig. 3.2 UK placings at the Eurovision Song Contest 1958–2018 by place category (Source Compiled by Zoë Jay) 56 Fig. 10.1 Eurovision songs sung in English (Source Compiled by Anika Gauja) 210

xi

List of Tables

Table 3.1

UK participation and performance at the Eurovision Song Contest, 1956–2018 53 Table 5.1 ESC Entrants 1993–2018 (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia) 105 Table 10.1 Key features of the Eurovision vote: Who participates? (1956–2019) 211 Table 10.2 Eurovision national song selection processes 2008–2018 214

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CHAPTER 1

Entangled Histories: Identity, Eurovision and European Integration Ben Wellings and Julie Kalman

Introduction Like many of the great one-liners in history, Jean Monnet’s ‘If I had to do it over again, I would begin with culture’ [Si c’était à refaire, je commencerais par la culture], was not spoken by its supposed author. Yet the enduring pull of the statement, and the fact that it has been attributed to Monnet, one of the pre-eminent ‘founding fathers’ of European integration, raises a question. Could culture have succeeded in integrating Europe, where politics and economics have not? Jacques Delors, French finance minister between 1981 and 1984, and eighth president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, saw Monnet’s statement as a reflection on a first stage of the construction of Europe. This first stage,

B. Wellings (*) · J. Kalman  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] J. Kalman e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_1

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2  B. WELLINGS AND J. KALMAN

he wrote, had been ‘a rather elitist adventure, essentially economic’, and because of this, ‘prosaic’ and limiting. It had left no room for enthusiasm, for the mobilisation of energies, or even, as Delors put it, ‘falling in love with Europe’. Europe’s economy had to be rebuilt in the postwar era, but ‘peoples’ had to learn, also, to communicate and to share. This communication and sharing, in Delors’ idealist vision, would have been the very way to rediscover a cultural Europe (Delors 1997). This chapter interrogates one element in the cultural construction of contemporary Europe: the Eurovision Song Contest. It views the development of Eurovision as part of the broader history of European integration since 1950. Given the longevity and popularity of the Contest, it makes a claim that the Eurovision Song Contest has been under-researched in the history of European integration and in particular the construction of European identities as an affective element of this political and historical project. Thus Eurovision should be taken seriously as an object of historical and political enquiry where European politics and the European past are (literally) performed before a live, global audience on an annual basis.

Identity and Integration in Europe Writing in 2010 before the European Union’s ‘multi-dimensional crises’ (Dinan 2017, p. 3) ushered in a new wave of identity politics across Europe, Wolfram Kaiser noted that ‘for a long time, much research on the history of European integration, especially the federalist hurrah historiography and the conventional diplomatic history of interstate negotiations, has been conceptually underdeveloped’ (Kaiser 2010, p. 45). The concept of ‘federalist hurrah historiography’ related to the unusually partisan nature of much of the early historically informed analyses of the origins of European integration and the enduring nature of a European identity that was ruptured by the development of the modern state system and the rise of nationalism. For Kaiser the main reasons for this conceptual underdevelopment of European integration theory in relation to broader themes of postwar history came about because historical attention within the European integration literature focused almost exclusively on interstate bargaining at the supranational centre by the original member-states. This emphasis alienated social and cultural historians, although they in turn failed to make conceptual connections across the two world wars or across the Cold War divide. His claim that this research ‘failed to make sufficient connections with either domestic contestation of EU policies or the Europeanization impact of integration

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on the member-states, their politics and societies’ (Kaiser 2010, pp. 48–50) has subsequently been filled by ‘post-functionalist’ scholars of the politics of European integration (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Usherwood and Startin 2013). Yet the place of what Sophia Vasilopoulou calls ‘identity’ in our understandings of the history of European integration (Vasilopoulou 2013, p. 188) and the way that this relates to politics in member-states and the legitimacy of the European project as a whole remain under-researched. Identity and culture are linked by ideology, which provides ideas and actions to make sense of how the world is and how it ought to be—often based on a comparison with how it was. Following Jonathan Hearn’s definition of culture as ‘the sum of mental phenomena that orient and structure life in social groups’ (Hearn 2006, p. 170), we argue that the ESC is a cultural production that sustains and creates a particular form of European identity that links strongly with the idea of postwar Europe as a zone of peace: an idea that has legitimised European integration since the end of the Second World War. As Furio Cerutti has argued, ‘only when people come to find that staying united is at the same time convenient for their well-being and relevant to their image of collective life can a new polity reach the critical point of acceptance’ (Cerutti 2008, p. 13). In this sense Eurovision is itself a manifestation of postwar European identity, expressed through a vision of a post-war Europe, where conflict has been sublimated and contained. The absence of consideration of identity in histories of European integration was all the more notable given the expectations of early actors and theorists of European integration that a European identity could, should and would come into being. Writing in the Revue general belge in 1952, Pierre Nothomb argued that ‘It is difficult to have a soul without having a body’ (HAEU FD 528, Nothomb 1952) [‘qu’il est bien difficile d’avoir une âme sans avoir un corps’]. The early steps towards European integration, embodied in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), provided corporeal form to this European spirit. The treaty creating the ECSC in 1951 was described by Walter Hallstein, the first secretary of the ECSC, as ‘the mission that our peoples entrusted to us, which is also the expression of the general European will’ (HAEU JMDS/70, Hallstein 1951). Hallstein continued We also know our most dangerous adversary: national selfishness which divides peoples and which still has allies in all of our countries. We are

4  B. WELLINGS AND J. KALMAN realistic enough to know that our project has not destroyed that adversary. But if, in the future, this accomplishment takes on life in the acts of men who are animated by a really European spirit, we shall have mortally wounded the adversary. What we seek is a unified Europe in which all free peoples will be able to live and work in a peaceful community. It must never again be possible for war to separate us. (HAEU JMDS/70, Hallstein 1951)

Commenting on the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 (which he helped draft) and which initiated the formation of the ECSC, Jean Monnet explained that Of primary importance is the supranational character of the proposed Community. For the first time, six countries have come together not to seek a provisional compromise among national interests, but to take a concerted view of their common interest … This represents a fundamental change in the nature of the relations among the countries of Europe, from the national form which opposed and divided them to the supranational form which reconciles and unites them. (HAEU JMDS/70, Monnet 1950)

Although the 1950s can be seen as a period of failure for federalist visions of European unity, notwithstanding the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Agency (Euratom) in 1957, this idea of national divisions being contained within a European framework remained pervasive across western Europe and over time. Situating its own European vocation within the liberal-national traditions of the Italian Risorgimento, the Italian federalist movement wrote in its official journal Risorgimento Europeo in 1962 that ‘The liberal revolution of the eighteenth century was not only national, but European’ [La rivoluzione liberale dell’Ottocento non fu solo nazionale, ma europea] (HAEU HG13 1962b). This Mazzinian teleology was specific to Italy, however. The more usual response was to contrast statist and nationalist ideas and actions against those of a ‘European’ nature. Referring to the new attitude at the Quai d’Orsay in 1962 Paul Struye, President of the Belgian Senate, criticised what he called De Gaulle’s ‘inveterate anti-­ Europeanism’ [antieuropéanisme invétéré] (HAEU FD 528 1962a). What both views shared was the idea that a European identity was facilitated and embodied by the emerging structures of supranational governance.

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This socio-political development had been anticipated by the (largely pro-European) academics concerned with analysing this emerging phenomenon. Building on existing analyses of how different nationalities amongst the erstwhile Austro-Hungarian Empire had interacted and formed a sense of shared identity, Carl Deutsch’s‘transactionalist’ approach suggested that the more people from different cultures were facilitated to interact, the more likely a new form of identification was to emerge (cited in Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2006, p. 10). What exactly this new form of identity might be was the point of some debate. In 1961 Ernst Haas, one of the first and most significant scholars of the process of European integration, anticipated a shift of loyalties from the nationstate to the European level of governance once the process of economic integration accelerated and assumed increasing political forms in Western Europe. This phenomenon would create a ‘new European nationalism’ (cited in Fligstein et al. 2012, p. 106). Actors as well as theorists adopted such a view in the first decades of European integration. The ‘Declaration on European Identity’ adopted in 1973 anticipated that ‘the European identity’, still conceived at this stage in the singular, ‘will evolve as a function of the dynamic construction of a United Europe’ (European Commission 1973). Despite the conscious efforts of federalists and unconscious work of industrialists, a strong and widespread affective attachment to ‘Europe’ did not take political form amongst European publics. As Perry Anderson noted, unlike the emergence of national and class consciousness, the historic process of European integration was not accompanied by any substantial equivalent transfer of subjective or affective loyalties to the new level of governance beyond a small coterie of true believers (Anderson 2009, p. 475). Indeed, this ability to produce ‘policies without politics’ (Schweiger 2017, p. 190) was for a long time seen as one of the EU’s great advantages before the crises of the 2010s politicised the process of European integration as never before. What emerged was not a ‘new European nationalism’ but a broad but weak ‘mass European identity’ (Bruter 2004), which could at best be described as ‘banal Europeanism’ (Cram 2009). This idea was developed by Laura Cram from Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism in which a sense of identity associated with a nation or—in this case—Europe is inculcated in the relevant population in a unstated, routinised and hence ‘banal’ ways via social structures and political habits (Billig 1995).

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It is in this context of the creation and maintenance of national and European identities that culture operates as a binding element. In his Postwar, Tony Judt detailed the revival of culture in the postwar era, as European governments expanded their public spending on the arts. From here, he argues, (western-) Europe-wide trends developed. This was the ‘new wave’ of writers, who broke ‘with narrative convention’, and who tackled ‘controversial, contemporary European themes’ (Judt 2005, p. 380). A caste of Europeans with the funds to do so travelled across the continent, following lauded productions of ‘Europe’s high arts’ (Judt 2005, p. 779). But what of the low? For Judt, European commonality here lies in the shared experience of American soft imperialism, including music and film. Judt saw only one popular European phenomenon that could ‘really unite Europe’, and this was football. In football was true European cosmopolitanism, ‘an object of European public attention’ (Judt 2005, p. 779), and properly egalitarian, attracting a wide, albeit largely male, public. Culture, in Judt’s mind, did not include the ESC. The ‘Eurovision Song Contest’, for some reason always enveloped in inverted commas in his book, features only as the object of popular satire. In his eyes, the ESC was ‘a commercial exercise’ where ‘B-league crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged’. The enthusiasm, he states, ‘with which the ESC promoted and celebrated a hopelessly dated format and a stream of inept performers reflected a growing culture of nostalgia, at once wistful and disabused’. And yet he noted that even in the 1970s, the ESC could boast a TV audience of hundreds of millions of spectators (Judt 2005, p. 482). A good starting point when seeking to research the Eurovision Song Contest as part of the broader history of European integration is to note its sheer popularity, as the viewer numbers suggest. In fact, the ESC is one of the longest-running television programmes of all time. It is screened live: each participating country puts forward an artist to perform an original song. It is important that it is countries, rather than artists, that compete at Eurovision. The current voting system stipulates that points are awarded first by a jury from each country, and then votes from the television audience are added. The winning country normally hosts the competition the following year. Although winning the ESC comes with considerable financial burdens and capacity issues for

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winning states particularly for broadcasters in smaller countries, winning is a matter of pride. As Dean Vuletic has noted, ‘Apart from earning the right for a state to host the contest, no material award, except for the bouquets, medals and trophies that have been presented to the composers, lyricists and singers of the victorious entry, has ever been attached to winning the contest’ (Vuletic 2018, p. 1). Audiences may or may not take the Contest or acts within it seriously, but it has become an annual fixture in the European—and increasingly global—television calendar. It is difficult to translate this sort of consumption into affective support for a political project such as European unification, but the correlations are worth investigating. In 2017, a poll of 1650 Britons by the polling company YouGov found that 56% of survey respondents wanted the UK to leave the Eurovision Song Contest. This figure closely corresponded to the 52% of voters who opted to leave the European Union in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU the year before. What we might call ‘Eurovision-scepticism’ correlated overwhelmingly with political attitudes: 76% of Leave voters were in favour of taking the UK out of Eurovision. Those who had voted to remain in the UK in 2016 were more favourably disposed to Eurovision with 65% in favour of remaining in the competition (cited in BBC News 2017). Furthermore, the high viewing figures in the 1970s noted by Judt have been sustained since that time. Although audience figures should be treated with caution, according to the Eurovision Song Contest’s organisers, 186 million people tuned into the 2018 Contest held in Lisbon (Eurovision Song Contest 2018a). This figure, combined with the fact that the contest has run—and grown—continuously since its inauguration in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1956, demands more serious and sustained research into the Contest, its history and the politics that shape it.

The Eurovision Song Contest as an Element of European Integration Reflecting on the defeat of the initiative for a European Defence Community in 1954, Richard McAllister argues that by the mid-1950s Western Europe’s ‘organisational and institutional landscape was beginning to resemble a breaker’s yard: there were far more wrecks than going concerns’ (McAllister 2010, p. 13). Amidst the wrecks and ­abandoned projects of this first wave of European integration, one of those ‘going

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concerns’ was the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The EBU was established in Torquay, England in February 1950, with twenty-three participating states. The EBU’s first president was former BBC Director-General, Sir Ian Jacob, and BBC provided the largest financial and technical support contributions to the fledgling organisation (European Broadcasting Union 1999/2000a, p. 15). The EBU replaced the earlier Geneva- and Brussels-based International Broadcasting Union (IBU), which had been discredited after falling under Nazi control in 1940 (European Broadcasting Union 1999/2000b, p. 15). In light of concerns about domination by individual countries or political actors, the EBU’s membership comprised the national broadcasting unions of Western European states, rather than the states themselves, giving it an inter-governmental rather than supranational character (European Broadcasting Union 1999/2000a, p. 15). The Eurovision Song Contest itself was the brainchild of Marcel Bezençon. Bezençon was director of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and had successfully televised the FIFA World Cup in 1954. The challenge facing the EBU was to promote television, the new mass means of communication. In 1955, Bezençon, inspired by Italy’s Sanremo Music Festival, conceived the idea of a European song competition. The aim of this initiative was ‘to encourage the creation of original songs and to stimulate, by means of an international competition, a spirit of friendly rivalry between writers and composers’ (Eurovision Song Contest 2015). The technology required to make multinational transmission possible was very new. This was to be risky, but hopefully a ground-breaking process. Seven of the founding EBU nations participated in the inaugural event, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and France. Lys Assia won the first contest for Switzerland. In 2006, Assia recalled how honoured she was to be asked to represent her country, saying of the song contest: ‘It was and still is very important. The idea is to open the frontiers … After the war, it was really necessary’ (cited in Manby 2018). Assia was, essentially, re-writing the history of the ESC, but this narrative shift is common to collective enterprises (Kølvraa 2012). As Ernest Renan, who in 1882 thought that nations would be replaced by some sort of European confederation (Renan 1994 [1882], p. 18), said of the creation of nations, ‘Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor’, because citizens of any nation are ‘obliged to have forgotten’ [doit avoir oublié] key episodes of what was considered their shared past (cited in Anderson 1991,

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p. 200). Benedict Anderson noted in his analysis of Renan’s famous exposition of nationhood and the role of memory in it that this awkward syntax was expressive of a necessary mental construct in order to create what Anderson called ‘the reassurance of fratricide’: the idea that past conflict had not only been overcome but formed the basis of present unity (Anderson 1991, pp. 199–201). So, too, the ESC has created an idealised version, not just of Europe and its postwar history, but of the story of its own development too. After the first competition, it was decided to run the contest again. Denmark, Austria, and the UK joined, and from 1957, the contest grew almost every year. By 1992, it was 23 nations strong, with the addition of Sweden, Monaco, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Malta, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Iceland. Tito’s Yugoslavia, aware of the tourism that participation could attract, had joined the contest in 1961. The dictatorships on the Iberian Peninsula had also done so, for similar reasons: Spain first participated in 1961, and Portugal followed in 1964. The commercial potential of the contest became increasingly clear, too, particularly after Domenico Modugno came third for Italy in 1958 with ‘Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu’, perhaps better known by its chorus: ‘Volare, oh, oh; Cantare, oh, oh, oh, oh.’ The song was an enormous hit across Europe and the United States. As with Europe and the European Union, the 1990s witnessed profound change leading to enlargement of membership of the EBU. In 1992, Yugoslavia participated for the last time. In 1993, it was the newly independent Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia that took part. In the following year, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia came to the contest. More nations from the former Eastern Bloc, as well as from the Caucasus, continued to join the ESC. By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and in the sixth decade of the contest’s existence, no less than 43 countries competed in the semi-finals, for 26 spots. This included Macedonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Albania, Andorra, Belarus, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Moldova, and San Marino. All are EBU members. Like the European Union, the borders of the EBU are not easily reduced to geographic criteria. The EBU, it must be said, allowed any country within its broadcast zone that met the ESC’s conditions to participate. Thus, Israel debuted in the contest in 1973, and has participated 42 times, with four wins. Morocco participated once only, in 1980, refusing to return following a poor

10  B. WELLINGS AND J. KALMAN

result. Australia, whose Special Broadcasting Service is listed as an EBU Associate, has participated since 2015. As noted above, in 2018 the ESC had an estimated 186 million viewers (Eurovision Song Contest 2018). This figure was higher than the estimated 165 million viewers for the 2018 UEFA Champions’ League final (UEFA 2018) and higher than the 168 million EU citizens who voted in elections to the European Parliament in 2014 (European Commission Directorate-General of Communication 2014). Viewer numbers in recent years have been relatively consistent, even considering Russia’s withdrawal from the contest in 2017. An estimated 197 million people watched the 2015 contest in Vienna, and 204 million watched the following year, when the contest was hosted by Sweden (Eurovision Song Contest 2018). According to data from the EBU, 182 million people watched the two semi-finals and final in 2017, held in Ukraine (Jordan 2017). These numbers do not consider those who stream the contest online. In 2017, there were six million live streaming sessions on the official ESC YouTube channel, as well as 8.5 million on-demand requests. The contest’s viewing demographic is also worthy of note: results produced by the EBU found that on average, 42.9% of 15–24-year-olds in forty-two countries watched the grand final. This was four times the average for the broadcast channels (Eurovision Song Contest 2018). Like the European Union, the Eurovision Song Contest reflects a wider distribution of power in Europe. The contest has a ‘Big Five’: France, Germany, the UK, Spain, and with its return to the ESC in 2011 after a fourteen-year absence, Italy. These are the countries that make the largest financial contributions to the EBU. Their reward is direct entry into the final of the Song Contest that, like the UEFA Champions’ League and European Championship, has knockout stages. Direct qualification for the finals may come at a cost of recognition for acts that have not had exposure in the semi-finals, but the advantage is that acts from the Big Five do not have to experience the indignity of popular and critical rejection at the semi-final stage. Each country has its own internal approach to selecting its entry. As long as the song has been designated the official entry of the country in question, the singer does not have to come from that given country, like team managers in EUFA and FIFA tournaments.

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Imagining Europe at Eurovision At Eurovision, Europe becomes an imagined community, if not quite a nation. In Benedict Anderson’s famous formulation, it was communication technology, initially the printing press, that helped ‘the image of their communion’ to live in the mind of each member of a linguistic community (Anderson 1991, p. 6). At the ESC, this communicative function is played by television, and is organised by the EBU. At Eurovision, the members are national entities: it is Europe’s nation-states (represented unproblematically as ‘nations’) that are on display in this forum and create the image of viewers’ communion. The ESC is ‘both an event where European community is constantly brought to life and a contest among nations’ (Tragaki 2013, p. 15). In this forum the question of the national and the supranational is brought to a temporary resolution; here, participants perform as individual acts representing EBU member-states before an imagined community that is Europe. Yet they speak to Europe, quite deliberately. Performers, hosts, and judges alike wish a good evening to ‘Europe’, and they thank the same ‘Europe’ when they are done. In the 1990 contest, the winning song was performed by Toto Cutugno for Italy. ‘Insieme: 1992’ referred explicitly to the creation of the Single Market, and the formal beginning of the European Union, scheduled for that year. Cutugno wrote and performed the song, with a backing group of five singers from Slovenia. He sang: ‘Europe is not far away / With you, a friend that I thought I’d lost / Give me your hand and you will see yourself flying’. ‘Together’, went the refrain: ‘Unite, unite Europe’. The ESC creates an imagined European community. As with Lys Assia’s narrative link between the postwar European project and the Eurovision Song Contest, Cutugno’s vision of divisions overcome is idealised, but every ‘imagined’ entity can also—and must—be idealised: this is precisely what nations do when they create narratives of themselves, and the project of European unity follows a strikingly similar narrative trajectory with its ‘dark age’ of nationalism and redemptive politics of European integration (Della Sala 2016). The ESC dances a ‘European two-step’ between the reality of geo-­ political events and the idealised, imagined space of the ESC. This idealisation sits at the confluence between politics and culture. As an annual event the ESC has more in common with commemoration than with ‘culture’ as per Donald Sassoon’s definition, essentially based on what people choose to consume during their leisure time with Eurovision

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part of the consumption of pop music from the 1950s (Sassoon 2006, p. 1354). Rather, as with Hearn’s anthropological understanding, culture and politics intersect overtly to create an ideology of belonging. This is never overtly admitted because ESC rules forbid ‘political’ symbols or lyrics, although they often slip through the net; a persistent sotto voce ‘politicisation’ exists, as with Georgia’s post-Russian invasion entrant of 2009 ‘We Don’t Wanna Put In’, France’s 2015 entry (timed to coincide with the centenary of the First World War) entitled ‘N’Oubliez pas’ and in Ukraine’s 2016 winning entry ‘1944’ (also post a Russian invasion and annexation). The ESC is an annual event watched by hundreds of millions of people across Europe and beyond that is devoted to the role of symbolic acts and the communication of messages, many of which infer, imply, assume or overtly suggest a European commonality. This makes the Contest difficult to dismiss as part of a broader conception of attempts to foster a European identity. The reason for this importance, as stated above, is because narratives of identity operate as ideological links between culture and political legitimacy. After the end of the so-called ‘permissive consensus’ on European integration from the debates about Maastricht to the politicisation of anti-EU sentiment during the crises of the 2010s, the European project required legitimising narratives in a way that it had not since the innovations of the 1940s and 1950s. Christoffer Kølvraa argues that what served to unite Europeans since the end of the Second World War was a memory of recent past conflict—and a past that is always, according to supporters of European integration, threatening to intercede in the present unless European integration is pushed further: ‘In myth, the past is always too close for comfort’ (Kølvraa 2012, p. 103). For Kølvraa a myth is a ‘narrative which situates a community between the profanity of an original catastrophe – the state of chaos from which it emerged – and the sacrality of a fully harmonious future – a fantasmatic utopia in which “we can finally be who we really are”’ (Kølvraa 2012, p. 103). Myth therefore gains its politically mobilising and legitimating force not by asserting that chaos has been fully assigned to the past and that utopia has been achieved, but by relating current problems and solutions as moves and counter-moves between chaos and utopia. The idea that European integration was an attempt to overcome murderous divisions in Europe’s past was a powerful one in early debates about European unity in the immediate postwar era. However, the drivers of European integration were diverse and not related to European

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idealism alone (Berend 2016, p. 231). Such diversity of motives is not how the EU explained itself to the world during the twenty-first century. Instead it deployed what Ian Manners and Philomena Murray call the ‘Nobel narrative’, due to the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to the EU in 2012 (Manners and Murray 2016, p. 185) in its declaratory and commemorative moments, although the idea had been prompted by the EU since the shock defeat of the Draft Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Speaking on behalf of the EU and its citizens, Angela Merkel declared on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome that: For centuries Europe has been an idea holding out hope of peace and understanding. That hope has been fulfilled. European unification has made peace and prosperity possible. It has brought about a sense of community and overcome differences. Each Member State has helped to unite Europe and to strengthen democracy and the rule of law. Thanks to the yearning for freedom of the peoples of central and eastern Europe the unnatural division of Europe is now consigned to the past. European integration shows that we have learnt the painful lessons of a history marked by bloody conflict. (European Council 2007)

The high point for this narrative came in 2012 when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace to the European Union, citing ‘the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights’ that had helped to ‘transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace’ (Norwegian Nobel Committee 2012). As noted above, the idea of ‘postwar’ Europe has a double meaning in this context: post-bellum Europe and the historic process of the overcoming of inter-state conflict after the end of the Second World War. The Rome Declaration in 2017 conflated some of the diverse narratives justifying the existence of the European Union. It needed to. The sixtieth anniversary of the Treaties of Rome came at the nadir of the EU’s sustained and multifaceted crises. The deployment of the Nobel narrative in these years was related to the depth of the crises the EU faced. The Nobel narrative operated as what Karsten Schulz-Forberg and Bo Stråth called an ‘utmost truth claim’ (Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010, p. 16). Such a claim was made to manage internal division and political critique as the EU entered its decade of crises after 2009.

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Declarations such as these served to remind an increasingly Eurosceptic citizenry that no matter how bad the EU might appear in the present, things had been worse in the past. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace was a powerful endorsement for the EU-as-peace-project narrative of European integration. But as the Nobel Prize Committee noted, the award came at a difficult time for the EU and a new division that had opened up in the most political way between northern and southern European countries. As the Eurozone and migration crises unfolded the ‘solidarity’ enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty was little in evidence. It is in this context that the Eurovision Song Contest helps create an ideational form of solidarity, transmitting European narratives through a format that reinforces the nation-state as the basic unit of European unity. The reality of internal division requires increased declaratory efforts towards unity in order to legitimise existing structures or ideas that are under sustained critique. Indeed, the peace narrative was in evidence at Eurovision during the decade of the EU’s greatest travails. The 2013 winner, ‘Only Teardrops’ was on one level a song about a difficult relationship, but on another was an allegory for overcoming conflict in Europe. The winner of the 2014 ESC, ‘Rise Like a Phoenix’ was overwhelmingly read as a song about transgender transformation. Yet on another it was also a song about postwar Europe. Måns Zelmerlöw’s and Petra Mede’s caricature of the ingredients for a successful song ‘Peace, Peace, Love, Love’ performed at interval of the 2016 final was the most obvious evidence of the existence of the Nobel narrative informing Eurovision entries. That is not to say that reality does not come to intrude on this festival of tolerance and inclusiveness. Just as in Anderson’s formulation, this community has finite, if elastic, boundaries (Anderson 1991, p. 7) These boundaries are malleable enough to make space for some new members, but finite when it comes to others. When the Eastern Bloc was dismantled, Eastern European nations rushed to join the EBU and participate in the Contest: as Fricker and Gluhovic note ‘as Europe goes, so does the ESC’ (Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, p. 24) highlighting the links between the form and content of the ESC and broader directions of European politics and history. Nor is the communion image of Europe harmonious in any straightforward way. Since eastern enlargement of the ESC there is the persistent question of ‘bloc’, or preferential voting, particularly with regard

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to the former communist countries (Yair 2018, pp. 8–10). Symbolic and reciprocal allocation of ‘douze points’ between Greece and the Republic of Cyprus became well established after 1974. But the arrival of the so-called ‘Balkan Bloc’ (Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia Herzegovina, Albania and Romania) and the ‘Warsaw Pact’ (Poland, Russia, and Ukraine) during the 1990s, sparked complaints of bloc voting (Gatherer 2006; Bronson 2007), notwithstanding past conflicts between these states. From 1999 to 2008, all of the contests were won by members of the Balkan Bloc, the Warsaw Pact, and the so-called ‘Viking Empire’, (Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania). More recently, and particularly following the Global Financial Crisis, different countries have refused to participate, generally citing the cost of participation. Fricker and Gluhovic detail how Portugal dropped out of the 2013 contest, as did Slovakia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Poland did not participate in 2012 and 2013 for slightly different reasons; its public broadcaster was focused on co-hosting the European Championship with Ukraine, acknowledging that hosting such international spectacles comes at a considerable cost (Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, p. 24). The popular dis-engagement and anger with politics and the European Union in the 2010s played an important role in all of the EU’s crises and was indeed generated in response to the handling of those crises. Claims about the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ were enhanced by the ‘intensive trans-governmentalism’ (Schweiger 2017, p. 195) that c­haracterised attempts to address the Eurozone crisis, or the attempts to re-allocate refugees across EU member-states, and the type of ­ de-legitimising comparisons between the EU and Britain’s history of representative democracy made during the Brexit referendum campaign. If a nation is, in Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation, ‘imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal, comradeship’ (Anderson 1991, p. 7), the horizontal element of this comradeship has eluded all but a small percentage of Europeans. Despite its own technocratic origins, the Eurovision Song Contest suggests something of a ‘bottom-up’, ‘low culture’ development in European integration. The technocratic origins of the European Union in the 1950s, designed to depoliticise economic decision-making, mean that the EU remains a project that is more remote from its citizens’ affections than its constituent member-states who are members of

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the EBU and represented at the ESC. This continuation of allegiances at the national and member-state level (state and nation being similar but distinct entities) means that ‘Europe’, despite all the messages contained in the structure and the content of the ESC, never quite attains the depth of popular political attachment that some nations reach. Eurovision reflects the historical compromise outlined by Alan Milward: Europe rescued the nation-state, which then became an indispensable constituent in the EU edifice (Milward 1992, p. 1). The EBU and the ESC are ‘inter-governmental’ in that member-states are a community of equal sovereigns. Yet the format is self-consciously European. In this way it represents an ideational expression of the historic compromise between state, national and European identities that has shaped European integration since the 1950s.

Conclusions If Jean Monnet were to start again with culture, it is far from certain that the Eurovision Song Contest would be the cultural arm of European integration that he would choose. In this sense, Eurovision is another of the unintended consequences of European integration. What began in 1956 as a contest between seven members of the EBU with entrants judged by technocratic experts, evolved in the following half century into a pan-European phenomenon, whose 186 million viewers in 2017 were equivalent to 36% of the EU’s population. None of this could have been foreseen by anyone other than the most committed European visionaries in 1956. Eurovision also embodies the historic compromise between federalist and statist visions of Europe. The Eurovision Song Contest provides a European forum and framework for the expression of identities aligned with European states—even for those participants with tangential links to Europe such as Israel, Australia and Morocco. This compromise, which guards state sovereignty, means that Eurovision manifests a popular European culture whilst promoting state identities. Sometimes these identities are what we could call national identities—as in the case of Germany and the Balkan states—and at other times the entrants represent states rather than nations—as in the cases of Belgium and the United Kingdom. Thus, what appears as a distinctively ‘European’ annual festival of culture is a product of the need to represent a multiplicity of states with diverse musical and historical traditions within a

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format constructed around the belief in the existence of some sort of European commonality that legitimises the format. Eurovision is an expression of a Europe that exists and a Europe that some people feel ought to exist (and some wish didn’t). Eurovision matters in contemporary Europe because culture legitimises political structures. Culture, in the sense of shared symbols that allow for membership of a particular self-defining group, shades into ideology when it provides a representation of what is, alongside a vision of what some people wish there to be. Culture provides a form of legitimacy for the social and political structures that exist to frame, govern and give expression to collective communities. It does so by aligning identities with these structures of governance so that, ideally, collectivities are never ruled by people who could be considered alien to the in-group. High culture long-provided a form of European commonality that was harder to establish through popular culture with its emphasis on the vernacular or Americanised forms of entertainment. This is one of the reasons why the style of songs at Eurovision can offend everyone with its uniformity, from the chanson style of the early Contest to the dominance of English in its more recent years. Nevertheless, Eurovision provides a sustainable level of European-ness which it imparts to its viewership of hundreds of millions each year. The European structure of the format suggests that there is such a thing as Europe that can be represented as a cultural community. By extension, a cultural existence suggests potential for existence as a political community too, and certain songs reflect this historic commonality. Yet culture was a legitimising afterthought for those concerned with integrating Europe economically. For those concerned to integrate Europe technologically, it was a useful vehicle to promote trans-national potentialities of television. Nevertheless, the Eurovision Song Contest represents an under-researched element of European integration. It is one that allows the possibility for an engagement with popular expressions of the inter-relationship between European, state, national and trans-national identities. It can broaden research on European integration into the area of popular culture. By examining the links between expressions of culture and the construction of European identities it can shed light on the ideas and identities that create and sustain the legitimacy of ‘Europe’ as a historical and political project.

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References Archival Sources—Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) HAEU FD 528, Nothomb, Pierre, ‘L’Europe naturelle (avec une carte)’, Extrait de la Revue generale belge, mars 1952, 2. HAEU FD 528, Struye, Paul, ‘Europe des patries ou Europe supranationale?’ Extrait de la Revue generale belge, Juin 1962a. HAEU HG13, Ugo d’Andrea, ‘Il liberalisimo per l’unita europea’, Risorgimento Europeo, May 1962b, 5. HAEU JMDS/70, ‘Declaration of Mr Jean Monnet President of the Schuman Plan Conference’, 1950. HAEU JMDS/70, ‘Declaration of Mr. Walter Hallstein, 19 March 1951’.

Secondary Sources Anderson, B (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, P (2009) The New Old World. London: Verso. BBC News (2017) ‘Eurovision 2017: Most Britons Want to Quit Contest— Survey’. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39899913. Accessed 13 May 2017. Berend, I (2016) The History of European Integration: A New Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge. Billig, M (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Bronson, F (2007) ‘East European “Bloc” Storms Eurovision Party’, 22 May 2007. https://www.reuters.com/article/television-eurovision-dc/east-europeanbloc-storms-eurovision-party-idUSN2123175020070522. Bruter, M (2004) Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cerutti, F (2008) ‘Why Political Identity and Legitimacy Matter in the European Union’, in F Cerutti and S Lucarelli (eds) The Search for a European Identity: Values, Policies and Legitimacy of the European Union. Abingdon: Routledge. Cram, L (2009) ‘Banal Europeanism: European Union Identity and National Identities in Synergy’, Nations and Nationalism, 15 (1), 101–108. Della Sala, V (2016) ‘Europe’s Odyssey? Political Myth and the European Union’, Nations and Nationalism, 22 (3), 524–541. Delors, J (1997) ‘L’Europe et la Culture’, Eurodialog: A Journal of European Dialogue. Institute of Central-East Europe 0/97. http://www.instesw.ebox. lublin.pl/ed/0/delors.html.en. Accessed 15 August 2018. Dinan, D (2017) ‘Crises in EU History’, in D Dinan, N Nugent, and W Paterson (eds) The European Union in Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, M (2006) Debates on European Integration: A Reader. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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European Broadcasting Union (1999/2000a) ‘1950—The EBU’, Diffusion: Journal of the EBU, Winter 1999/2000. European Broadcasting Union (1999/2000b) ‘Before Torquay’, Diffusion: Journal of the EBU, Winter 1999/2000. European Commission (1973) ‘Declaration on European Identity’, Bulletin of the European Communities, 118–122. Luxembourg: Office for official publications of the European Communities, December 1973. European Commission Directorate-General of Communication (2014) ‘Review: European and National Elections Figured Out’. http://www.europarl. europa.eu/pdf/elections_results/review.pdf. Accessed 11 December 2018. European Council (2007) ‘Berlin Declaration’. europa.eu/50/docs/berlin_ declaration_en.pdf. Accessed 20 July 2018. Eurovision Song Contest (2015) ‘A Diamond Day for Eurovision’, 19 October 2015. https://eurovision.tv/story/a-diamond-day-for-the-eurovision-songcontest. Accessed 24 November 2018. Eurovision Song Contest (2018a) ‘186 Million Viewers for the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest’, Eurovision Song Contest, 24 May 2018. https://eurovision.tv/ story/186-million-viewers-2018-eurovision-song-contest. Accessed 31 January 2019. Eurovision Song Contest (2018b) ‘Viewing Figures’. https://eurovisionworld. com/tag/viewing-figures. Accessed 29 January 2019. Fligstein, N, Polyakova, A, and Sandholtz, W (2012) ‘European Integration, Nationalism and European Identity’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50 (1), 106–122. Fricker, K and Gluhovic, M (2013) ‘Introduction: Eurovision and the New Europe’, in K Fricker and M Gluhovic (eds) Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gatherer, D (2006) ‘Comparison of Eurovision Song Contest Simulation with Actual Results Reveals Shifting Patterns of Collusive Voting Alliances’, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 9 (2), 1. http://jasss.soc. surrey.ac.uk/9/2/1.html. Hearn, J (2006) Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hooghe, L and Marks, G (2009) ‘A Post-functionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus’, British Journal of Political Science, 39 (1), 1–23. Jordan, P (2017) ‘The 2017 Eurovision Song Contest Reaches Over 180 Million Viewers’. https://eurovision.tv/story/Eurovision-2017-reaches-more-than180-million. Accessed 29 January 2019. Judt, T (2005) Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: William Heinemann.

20  B. WELLINGS AND J. KALMAN Kaiser, W (2010) ‘From Isolation to Centrality: Contemporary History Meets European Studies’, in W Kaiser and A Varsori (eds) European Union History: Themes and Debates. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kølvraa, C (2012) Imaging Europe as a Global Player: The Ideological Construction of a New European Identity Within the EU. Brussels: Peter Lang. Manby, C (2018) ‘Lys Assia: First Winner of the Eurovision Song Contest Who Made Comeback Attempts in Her Late Eighties’, The Independent 26 March 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lys-assia-died-deadeurovision-song-contest-switzerland-lenfant-que-j-tais-a8274156.html. Accessed 15 August 2018. Manners, I and Murray, P (2016) ‘The End of a Noble Narrative? European Integration Narratives After the Nobel Peace Prize’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 54 (1), 185–202. McAllister, R (2010) European Union: An Historical and Political Survey. London: Routledge. Milward, A (1992) The European Rescue of the Nation-State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Norwegian Nobel Committee (2012) ‘The Nobel Peace Prize for 2012—Press Release’, 12 October 2012. www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/press.html. Accessed 20 July 2018. Renan, E (1994 [1882]) ‘Qu’est-ce que une nation?’ in A Smith and J Hutchinson (eds) Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sassoon, D (2006) The Culture of the Europeans from 1800 to the Present. London: HarperCollins. Schulz-Forberg, H and Stråth, B (2010) The Political History of European Integration: The Hypocrisy of Democracy Through Market. Abingdon: Routledge. Schweiger, C (2017) ‘The Legitimacy Challenge’, in D Dinan, N Nugent, and W Patterson (eds) The European Union in Crisis, 188–211. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tragaki, D (2013) ‘Introduction’, in D Tragaki (ed) Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. UEFA (2018) ‘Worldwide Reach of the Lisbon Final [Date of article], EUEFA. com. https://fr.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/news/newsid=2111684.html. Accessed 28 January 2018. Usherwood, S and Startin, N (2013) ‘Euroscepticism as a Persistent Phenomenon’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 51 (1), 1–16. Vasilopoulou, S (2013) ‘Book Reviews: Ben Wellings, English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: Losing the Peace’, Nations and Nationalism, 19 (1), 187–188. Vuletic, D (2018) Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Yair, G (2018) ‘Douze Points: Eurovisions and Euro-Divisions in the Eurovision Song Contest—Review of Two Decades of Research’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549418776562.

CHAPTER 2

Germany as Good European: National Atonement and Performing Europeanness in the Eurovision Song Contest Alison Lewis

For all full members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), participation in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the EBU’s ­ ­flagship media event, affords the nation-state a wealth of opportunities to re-present itself on an annual basis. For this reason, the ESC serves well as a complex cultural barometer of processes of national identification as well as official nation branding strategies. It can also provide a telling indicator of what kinds of national representations are politically and culturally permissible at various junctures in the contest’s history. As a dynamic site for imagining the nation, the ESC therefore provides an evolving, shifting window onto national identity and the question of nationalism since World War Two in Europe. Especially for perpetrator nations, or ones with a troubled history of aggression, occupation and violence, the ESC offers a powerful symbolic means of making amends for histories of violence. The history of Eurovision can thus shed interesting light on what culture is able to bring to the story of postwar A. Lewis (*)  The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_2

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Europe. I argue in this chapter that for Germany—still haunted by its responsibility for two World Wars and the Holocaust—participation in Eurovision offers an intriguing instance of how a major European power can navigate a problematic past and an at times contentious present. The story of Germany’s place in Eurovision history can thus provide something of a cultural counter-narrative to the nation’s rise as the powerhouse of Europe. By turning to Germany’s engagement in the cultural sphere, and its nation-imagining strategies in Eurovision, we arrive at a rather different picture of German hegemony in Europe. Not only do countries such as Germany actively harness the ESC to counteract negative perceptions and stereotypes in the aftermath of war, they are also able to use the song contest’s immense symbolic power to overwrite, correct and manage their public image at crucial junctures. These public corrections to collective memory have the rather paradoxical effect of preserving both old and new memories in the public realm. While the adjustment of national images holds true for smaller perpetrator countries like Serbia in the wake of the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, it is most in evidence in the history of one of the largest participating countries Germany. Indeed, it could be argued that the burden of recalling and confessing to histories of violence, and offering atonement for them, is offloaded onto Germany by other perpetrator nations such as Austria (and virtually all other continental countries with histories of collaboration). In many ways in Eurovision Germany came to shoulder the burden of all perpetrator nations in Europe.1 While Eurovision is a national song competition, it is, as Gonzales Torres remarks ‘one of the most successful pan-European identity-­ building vehicles to date’ (Torres 2011, p. 247). It offers opportunities for ‘endogenous’ articulation of identity as well as ‘exogenous’ expressions, namely of presenting the nation to others in Europe and increasingly beyond. As a cultural competition it provides an experimental arena for national image-making within a European frame. As Dean Vuletic has written: ‘there is something peculiarly European about the ESC that transcends national identifications’ (Vuletic 2018, p. 4). German engagement with the ESC offers a good vantage point from whence to examine the interplay between national and European identity-formation. I restrict myself to West Germany’s participation in the ESC until reunification in 1990, and the participation of the unified Federal Republic of Germany from that date. Germany not only fashioned itself as a reformed, peaceful nation, but also as a country that is

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a reliable neighbour, a good citizen and above all a ‘good European.’ The Europeanisation of German identity runs as a red thread throughout postwar German history. It can be seen in Germany’s habitus on the stage of European and global politics, in its support for European integration, as well as in its cultural diplomacy. This chapter will show how post-War Germany reinvented itself at the ESC as ‘the Good European’. It will also explore how Germany manages to demonstrate to Europe that it takes the contest seriously without wanting to dominate it. Germany is generally happy to compete without winning.

Nationalism, National Identity and Vergangenheitsbewältigung [Mastering the Past] In the wake of Germany’s defeat at the end of World War Two, nationalism represented for the vast majority of Germans in both East and West, that is, in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a defeated and discredited ideal. In politics nationalism was a ‘weakened force’ (Crawford et al. 1999, p. 16) if not a thoroughly spent force, especially as a ‘legitimate basis for social integration’ (Crawford et al. 1999, p. 16). The immediate partition of Germany into four occupied zones, and the subsequent division into two ideological blocks during the Cold War, effectively prepared the way for two separate conceptions of nationhood (Crawford et al. 1999, p. 16), both of which were decidedly anti-nationalistic. In the West, the French, American and British zones merged to form a Western-looking, liberal democracy which saw all West German governments embracing European integration ‘based on a federalist model—the “United States of Europe”’ (Risse and Engelmann-Martin 2002, p. 287). In the East, the communist regime that was set up under Soviet occupation was forged on anti-fascist ideals by leaders exiled under the National Socialists who defined themselves as anti-fascist resistance fighters, and as ‘Nazism’s polar opposite’ (Herf 1997, p. 254). The communist regime equated fascism with capitalism and in breaking with capitalist economics it believed its reform measures were far more rigorous than those in the West. Nationalism was officially replaced by a new form of solidarity that was committed above all to the ideal of ‘socialist internationalism’ and the ‘international brotherhood of man’ (Morris 1966, p. 48). In reality, nationalist rhetoric survived in the GDR in various patriotic guises such

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as the ideological drive to defeat all internal enemies or ‘negative-hostile’ elements of society as well as in claims to represent the better German half of a divided nation. However, because participation in the ESC was limited to West Germany, my focus shall in the following be on West German efforts to atone for the Nazi past through culture. West German attempts to face the crimes of National Socialism were premised on Allied forces’ efforts to de-Nazify, re-educate and demilitarise Germany after the war. Although de-Nazification was carried out in far less ambitious manner than planned in the Western sectors (Remy 2002, p. 146), it remained the guiding principle underpinning political, economic and social restructuring in the fledging new Federal Republic founded in May 1949. It undergirded the historic Nuremberg Trials from November 1945 to October 1946, and German efforts to hunt down major Nazi war criminals that culminated in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 as well as the German-led Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt 1963–1965, 1965–1966 and 1967–1968. West Germany pro-actively made amends for past aggression among other things through adopting a pro-European stance in the spheres of politics, economic development and culture. In West Germany the commitment to atonement led to restitution and reparations payments to Israel in 1953 (Herf 1997, p. 283), and to a belated agreement in 1998 and 1999 to pay compensation to the victims of slave labour (Kelly 2016, p. 29). In the late sixties, the politics of atonement found its most poignant symbolic expression in gestures such as Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famous kneeling in front of the Warsaw ghetto memorial in Poland in December 1970. Perhaps most importantly for the context of the ESC, atonement also led to the first German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s ‘westernization’ efforts (Herf 1997, p. 297) and his government’s foreign policy of western integration and rearmament (Herf 1997, p. 298). This in turn found its most dominant expression in Franco-German rapprochement of the postwar era which ushered in a new era of stable interactions in which the ‘hereditary enmity’ between France and Germany evolved into a ‘hereditary friendship’ (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 5). Adenauer’s western orientation was of course integral to the West German government’s efforts at Soviet containment during the Cold War but the renewed friendship and the overcoming of historical antagonisms between France and Germany was far more than a mere byproduct of Cold War tensions. In the fifties, the Christian Democratic

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Adenauer from the Rhineland, the territory closest to France, was a determined Europeanist. He was content to play the role of junior partner in the Franco-German friendship (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 7). He lent his support to France’s vision of a supranational system in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), founded in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris, which represents the ‘birth of the FrancoGerman axis’ (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 7). The ensuing Elysée Treaty, signed in 1963, which provided the ‘engine’ of Franco-German relations, was another pivotal moment in reconciliation, and ‘allowed France to cooperate and control Germany at the same time’ (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 7). The Treaty effectively fostered Germany’s reintegration into the community of nations and allowed it to assert its interests in Europe and on the global stage (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 7). In the seventies, the balance of power shifted in favour of Germany after the oil crises and again in 1990 after German reunification when Germany took on a stronger strategic role in Europe (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 8).

European Integration in the Cultural Sphere and Europeanising Germany Franco-German rapprochement and the reinvention of the two formerly hostile countries as an axis or couple that subtends other relationships and even cuts across Germany’s alliance to the US, is crucial to understanding Germany’s participation in the ESC. While the Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950 between the ‘inner six’ states—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg—which would develop into the ECSC, may seem to have little in common with the initiative a few years later of the EBU to set up a song contest, both these initiatives were fuelled by a similar desire to tackle the ‘long-lasting antagonism feeding on rivalry for territory and hegemony’ (Germond and Türk 2008, p. 1) between France and Germany that was at the root of two world wars. In this regard, politics and culture are by no means distinct, with culture playing an important role in legitimising political actions and agreements. The Schuman Declaration was far-sighted and envisaged that managing coal and steel unilaterally would ‘remove all possibility of a new war’ (Munte 2008, p. 168), regarding cooperation as a first step toward a European federation.

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The EBC, which was set up in 1950 just after the Council of Europe, predated the founding of the ECSC, and its alternative organisation, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), as well as the European Atomic Energy Community in 1957. The EBU was also born of a similar sentiment to curb German hegemony and to promote peace and stability through cooperation in the cultural rather than the economic arena. Moreover, the cooperation which the EBU proposed through bringing together former enemies in shared cultural events was, like the ECSC, also motivated by a pragmatic desire to share resources and to exchange programs between countries with different television standards (Pollock and Woods 2015, p. 101). It aimed to showcase European television technologies and was especially designed to enable small broadcasters to enter into markets they would otherwise have difficulty in accessing (Collins 1998, p. 27). What is largely unspoken in the EBU’s charter is the idea that exchanging telecommunications technologies through joint events would prevent any one European country gaining a technological advantage over another. As Dean Vuletic has argued, in the context of global broadcasting organisations, the ESC was a ‘unique Western European feat’, and took place in the broader context of a ‘regional economic and political integration that was unmatched on any other continent’ (Vuletic 2018, p. 30). The Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson, as it was known in Germany until 2001, may not have been a French initiative but it was dominated by the French-language in its early years and the chanson-style of popular song. Germany was arguably from the start of Eurovision a minor rather than a major partner. Interestingly, the founding members of Eurovision were those same six members who signed the Treaty of Paris, and were foundational members of the ECSC, plus Switzerland. In its second year, the Grand Prix Eurovision expanded to add Denmark, the United Kingdom and Austria, the latter three countries not being part of the economic cooperation of the ECSC but who, like neutral Switzerland, were eager to participate in cultural collaborations. Joining the ESC became therefore a proxy in the case of the Swiss and Austrians for economic cooperation with the defeated enemy. There is a school of political thought that believes that the political culture of a nation can be measured in terms of the strength of its institutions, and that Germany’s postwar political and economic institutions are the source of the country’s success and prosperity (Crawford et al. 1999, p. 13). West Germany’s political institutions are generally

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considered to be very stable, and its integration into European and international alliances such as the EU and NATO strong. Germany, for instance, was happy to sacrifice its sovereignty in the forty-years after WWII and to atone for its past crimes by becoming European. Germans are for this reason often described as having a ‘post-national identity’, a ‘post-national democracy’ (Bracher 2001, p. 297), or having national pride in their constitution and stable currency, in a ‘Deutschmark Nationalism,’ as Jürgen Habermas once remarked (Pensky 1995, p. 73). Because of this, foreign policy represents, in relation to the question of sovereignty, something of a puzzle, as Crawford, Brady and Wiliarty point out: Since 1949, it [Germany] has accepted limits on its sovereignty and military capabilities in a way that is perhaps unique in world history for an important European power. Contrary to many expectations, there has been little evidence of a pernicious German nationalism in foreign policy behaviour either of a right-wing or an anti-integrationist variety. Indeed, in its international behavior, since 1949, Germany appears to have made a radical break with traditional hallmarks of and ‘normal’ practices of national sovereignty so common to other European democracies. Why? (Crawford et al. 1999, p. 22)

Germany’s route to mastering its Nazi past through European integration was memorably captured by exiled writer and national icon Thomas Mann in 1953 when he told students in Hamburg to strive for ‘not a German Europe but a European Germany’ (Garton Ash 2012). The vision of a European Germany has become a consensus of the political elites in the West (Risse and Engelmann-Martin 2002, p. 287), which has ‘turned out to be a blessing’ for Germany (Risse 2010, p. 66), but less so in recent years for less prosperous members of the EU. As Ulrich Beck and Garton Ash both remarked during the second Euro crisis of 2012, how did it come to pass that we have a variation that few foresaw: a European Germany in a German Europe (Beck 2013, p. 10; Garton Ash 2012). The story of Germany’s participation in the ESC is part of this broader narrative of the making of a European Germany, and more latterly of a European Germany in a German Europe. It is implicated also in the account of how we currently came to have a German Europe, or a Europe that is dominated by Germany and its system

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of ‘ordo-liberalism’. Ordo-liberalism is a peculiar German form of liberal democracy that stresses adherence to formal rules and to fiscal responsibility, stability and restraint especially in relation to acceptable levels of state debt (Galpin 2015, p. 32). In the eyes of Charlotte Galpin, it has resulted in the ‘exclusion of [non-compliant countries such as] Greece from an “imagined” Northern European community’ (Galpin 2015, p. 27).

Reinventing Germany in ESC as a Good European Risse and Engelmann-Martin contend that to be ‘a “good German” means nowadays to be a “good European” and to wholeheartedly support European integration’ although the rise of the far-right in Germany may suggest that this is changing (Risse and Engelmann-Martin 2002, p. 287). There are several ways in which this credo plays out in Eurovision, first in the habitus of Germany as a participant, and second, in the reception of German entries as borne out in the voting. I will first explore German entries in the history of the competition to see to what extent they project an image of being a ‘good European’. Germany has participated in Eurovision since its outset in 1956, and has missed only one year in 1996 when it failed to qualify. As already mentioned, it was one of the six participating countries in the first Eurovision contest held in Lugarno in Switzerland. German entries are noteworthy on the one hand for their avoidance of overt national and regional symbols, codes and signifiers. In many ways, they are similar to Swiss entries and to a lesser extent to Austrian (Baumgartner 2007, p. 38). They are also distinguished by their embrace of themes of peace and contrition, which accords with their approach to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and their projection of a Europeanised German identity. On the other hand, during the periods of the free language rule their entries were characterised by an eagerness to sing in languages other than German. In the early years, it was French, and since 1999 they were one of the first countries to mix other languages into German, using predominantly English from 2000 onward. I will first examine the style of German entries in terms of the use of national music styles and other signifiers such as costumes, instruments, musical genre and style as well as the themes of songs. A striking feature of Germany’s choice of artists is the cosmopolitanism of the competitors selected to represent the country. Many countries

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select non-national singers as their representative but Germany has a ­particularly strong track record of choosing to send non-national singers, or nationals with non-Germanic-sounding names. The ESC is an especially good forum for the ‘celebration of a cosmopolitan world’ despite the fact that cultural diversity is framed and bound by the nation-state (Georgiou 2008, p. 148). The cosmopolitan flavour of German entries is of course a reflection of the Americanisation of German popular music and popular culture in general, with Germany embracing American music styles such as jazz, swing and boogie woogie in the postwar era with gusto. American music, in particular jazz, was, moreover, seen as a moderating force, which progressive Germans welcomed, and some embraced as part of the project of ‘liberalizing German society after 1945’ (Hurley 2009, p. 20). Showing that one was open to American styles of music, especially to forms of music the Nazis decried as ‘Nigger-Jew-Jazz’ (Hurley 2009, p. 19), was for many a way of demonstrating that Germany had become a modern transparent democracy (Hurley 2009, p. 21). Hence, in 1956 Germany sent two entries, the country singer Freddy Quinn with the rock’n’roll song ‘So geht das jede Nacht’ [It is like this every night], and Walter Andreas Schwarz with a slow ballad ‘Im Wartesaal zum großen Glück’ [In the waiting room of happiness]. Freddy Quinn was an Austrian with an Irish father, who had spent some years of his youth in Virginia, and spoke fluent English and German. He performed to American GIs and on American radio in Germany, before being discovered by a German record label in the mid-fifties. In the sixties Germany sent three artists who were not born in Germany, in 1964 the Bulgarian-born Nora Nova, in 1968 the Norwegian Wencke Myhre, and in 1969 the Swedish singer Siw Malmqvist. In the seventies, in 1973 Germany selected Gitte (Gitte Haenning), born in Denmark, in 1976 the Les Humphreys Singers, who were born in various countries, including England, in 1977 Silver Convention, a trio of singers from Munich, whose members were born in Germany, Austria and the US, in 1978 the British-German singer Ireen Sheer, and in 1979 several of the band members of Dschinghis Khan were born outside Germany. In the eighties the trend continued with the Lithuanian singer Lena Valaitis singing Johnny Blue in 1981, and Nino de Angelo, of Italian descent, performing in 1989. In the 2000s, Germany sent in 2006 an Australian national, Jane Comerford, who sang with her band Texas Lightening and in 2014 it sent the Ukrainian singer Elaiza.

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In the context of a thoroughly de-Nazified and internationalised cultural landscape, Germany’s choice of European performers and occasionally singers from outside Europe is in itself nothing surprising. It is moreover fairly representative of the broader international thrust of West Germany’s popular music industry and of shifts in German tastes. The German popular music market was heavily dominated by international stars, such as Dalida (a French-Italian singer, who recorded German versions of French chansons), Vico Torriani (a Swiss Schlager singer), Gus Backus (an American German Schlager singer and GI), Roberto Blanco (born in Tunisia but of Afro-Cuban background who did German versions of Tom Jones’ hits in the 1970s), and Roy Black (a German Schlager singer but with a US sounding name, who was dubbed the German Roy Orbison). There were also international stars who made German-language versions of their hits such as the American Connie Francis and the Greek Nana Mouskouri. Hence, the selection of representatives for Eurovision was not necessarily a conscious decision to avoid nationals or to prioritise non-nationals but more the result of changing tastes in the German music industry and postwar music more generally. Having said that, the popularity of these non-German national singers both in Eurovision and in popular music is deeply telling of the ambivalence felt towards cultural expressions of nationalism in the 60s and 70s. In the fifties and sixties German Schlager music was cosmopolitan in feel and style. The Schlager itself was a porous, flexible genre of popular commercial music that greedily absorbed and adapted international influences. The Schlager was effectively a perfect medium for facilitating a ‘cultural transfer across the Atlantic,’ as Patrick Farges writes (Farges 2011, p. 207). From around 1953 to the mid-sixties German language songs topped the charts in Germany, and Freddy Quinn was the most popular singer (Nonn 2012, p. 261). But from 1966 this was all to change, when for the first time English language songs topped the charts (Nonn 2012, p. 262). The Beatles effectively replaced Freddy Quinn (Nonn 2012, p. 262). As Baumgartner writes, singing German Schlager songs with a foreign accent was hugely popular in Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s but also in Europe (Baumgartner 2007, p. 39). For instance, Germany sent the immensely popular Alice and Ellen Kessler to the ESC in 1959. The Kessler twin sisters were German born but styled themselves on American wartime and postwar swing singers. Their song ‘Heute Abend wollen wir tanzen geh’n’ [Let’s go dancing tonight], which was sung in German, features

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the cheeky opening line ‘Hello boy,’ sung with the slightest hint of an American accent. In 1962, the teenage star Conny Froboess was selected with the song ‘Zwei kleine Italiener’ [Two little Italians], a fun pop song which referenced Italian guest workers. In the early years of the contest, before the German Schlager had taken root as a much-loved form of popular music, German entries demonstrated a certain malleability of style. In 1957 and 1960 the entries chosen had a distinct transcultural flavour, with a smattering of other languages (English, French, Italian) thrown into the German, and incorporating other European styles of music such as the bolero. These acts also drew on the older wartime Schlager tradition of Zarah Leander—a Swedish singer and actress popular under Nazi Germany– and her 1942 international hit ‘Ich weiß es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen’ [I know one day a miracle will happen]. In addition to the idioms of wartime Schlager, some of Germany’s early entries, such as Lale Andersen’s ‘Einmal sehen wir uns wieder’ [We will see each other again] from 1961, drew on the traditions of the more ‘serious’ and ­musically complex strain of German popular music from 1930s theatre and musicals such as Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera. German Eurovision entries throughout the sixties captured much of the zeitgeist of international popular music, with some entries displaying a British Invasion feel, such as in Inge Brück’s 1967 song ‘Anouschka’. In the 1970s and ’80s, German entries alternated between Schlager, and entries that followed international trends, including American trends, in popular music, modifying and incorporating elements of disco, folk rock, Californian rock, and even rap. In 1970 and 1971 Germany was represented by Katja Ebstein who sang songs in hybrid contemporary international styles incorporating elements of jazz, soul and blues as well as soft rock and folk rock that scored well. As the genre of the Schlager established itself as a distinct type of pop music in the seventies and early eighties during its heyday (Farges 2011, p. 206), it gradually acquired German associations and invoked inevitably a certain amount of German pride. To counteract the dominance of British pop and American music, the German television station ZDF launched its popular show Hitparade with Thomas Dieter Heck which ran until 1984 (Farges 2011, p. 206). But even as Schlager firmed up as a particularly German variation of the pop song, entries in ESC never invoked or cited traditional German symbols such as the Alps, beer halls, lederhosen, dirndls, yodelling, or used one of the many regional dialects. This suggests a deliberate postwar

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move away from such traditional symbols of Germanness, if not always in domestic settings, then at least in international contexts. This is all the more surprising given that the ESC thrives on national stereotypes (Georgiou 2008, p. 144).

German Victory in ESC in 1982—Europe Affirms Germany as Good European Germany’s participation in the seventies and eighties is unthinkable without the influence of songwriter and producer Ralph Siegel. Siegel has been a major contributor to ESC over the years, and to Germany’s success, and he understood the challenges for Germany of ‘translating a song’s meaning into a pan-European language through musical/aural and visual codes meant to be understood by audiences all over Europe’ (Hindrichs 2007, p. 50). For the rest of this chapter I will examine some of the most successful strategies Germany has deployed to win the contest, and scrutinise the reception of the winning acts in terms of political, economic and other factors which contributed to producing a favourable climate for a win. What was it about Germany’s image-making at the time that resonated especially well with European audiences? Do Germany’s wins square with the renewed image of Germany as a peaceful, reformed and contrite power? How do the wins reflect Germany’s identity as a democratic Europeanised country? A Eurovision song is a mass-media act of communication, which implies a creator or sender of the message and a recipient or addressee. In putting together an entry, a national broadcaster must pay attention to multiple dimensions of the song, from its composition, its lyrics, the language it is sung in, the style of music, the choice of singer, their gender, sexuality and ethnicity, the costumes, the choreography, lighting and staging, and the consistency of performance. The Eurovision song can for this reason be considered to be a collection of ‘multimodal texts,’ whereby multimodal refers to texts or acts of communication which combine verbal and non-verbal elements, such as visual, verbal and aural semiotic codes as well as multiple codes relating to nationality, gender, ethnicity etc. As Balirano argues in relation to the ‘multimodal prosody’ of drag acts such as Conchita Wurst at Eurovision, ‘images play an equal, if not more important, role in the construal of meaning’ (Balirano 2017, p. 157). All of the modes of a song performance

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contribute to the success or failure of the act of communication, and each aspect must be carefully calibrated in relation to the others. As Thorsten Hindrichs writes, there needs to be a ‘well-balanced relation between performer, image, song, sound, visual appearance, and the spatial arrangement of setting in order to create the ideal mise-en-scène for the performance’ (Hindrichs 2007, p. 57). In 1970 and 1971 Germany placed third in consecutive years, sending the singer Katja Ebstein with well-composed songs replete with powerful uplifting choruses. Both acts were tastefully and simply staged, with Ebstein wearing pale blue in 1970 and a tight-fitting pantsuit in 1971. One song was about the power of the miracle of love, and the other ‘Diese Welt’ [This World] was a universal celebration of life, hope and inclusivity with a warning about environmental pollution. Towards the end of the seventies, Germany picked up some high placings again with Ralph Siegel’s high energy disco song Dschingis Khan in 1979, co-written with the lyricist Bernd Meinunger, and with a return of Katja Ebstein in 1980 with a song also jointly composed by Meinunger, titled ‘Theater,’ which placed second (Hindrichs 2007, p. 55). In 1981 Germany sent another Ralph Siegel composition with a ballad about a blind boy ‘Johnny Blue’ which placed second. Siegel was finally granted a victory in 1982 with Nicole performing ‘Ein bißchen Frieden’ [A little peace]. In the first three decades of Eurovision Germany was statistically far more likely to win choosing a female performer, and a single performer rather than a group act. In 1982 Siegel chose a female performer and a theme that was not only extraordinarily topical but also a source of high anxiety for Europeans. The song was a folk ballad that was a heartfelt plea for ‘a little peace’ sung by the young and fresh-faced Nicole seated behind a large twelve-string guitar. The set was dominated by the colours of black and white, Nicole was wearing a demure black dress, her guitar was white and her backing singers wore contrasting white. Siegel was not only a master at composition, he also held tight control over the visual staging of his songs as well (Hindrichs 2007, p. 55). The message he conveyed was uncomplicated, both lyrically, aurally and visually. Here appeared to be a young woman sitting in her bedroom playing guitar and ‘worrying about the “bomb”’ (Hindrichs 2007, p. 55). The instrumentation was simple and emotive, neatly underscoring the message, creating a perfect ‘synthesis of music, sound and visuality’ (Hindrichs 2007, p. 57). Aurally, like many of Siegel’s compositions, the song was

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harmonically straightforward, with simple melodic lines, making use of ‘sequences of short three- or four-note motives’ and following a standard verse-chorus structure (Hindrichs 2007, pp. 53–55). The theme of Nicole’s song, and her performance, touched a raw nerve with Europeans. Against the backdrop of the alarming escalation of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race in the early 80s, as a song about peace, ‘Ein bißchen Frieden’ had instant and broad appeal. It harked back to the antiwar movement of a decade earlier promoted by American folk singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and the choice of acoustic rather than electric guitar made this reference clear. Yet, Nicole was not a hippy, a member of the new Greens party, or a representative of flower-power from the seventies; she was dressed decorously in a dark polka dot dress, her long hair draped over her shoulders, positioned behind her large shiny guitar. She was styled deliberately to appeal to a broad mainstream pan-European audience. The national context to the song was that the West German government, a coalition of SPD and FDP, which had come to power in 1969, was forced into making unpopular compromises with its NATO partners in the face of a worrying new arms race after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (Judt 2007, p. 590). Chancellor Helmut Schmidt agreed to the unpopular measure of deploying Pershing and Cruise missiles on German soil in December 1979 in response to Moscow’s stationing of a new generation of medium-range missiles in Ukraine (Judt 2007, p. 590). Western leaders, including French President and the British Prime Minister, agreed that stockpiling nuclear weapons was only helpful as a deterrent (Judt 2007, p. 591). Germany who was most affected by the decision to deploy nuclear weapons reluctantly fell into line. Schmidt’s decision to essentially disarm through armaments in a twostep process—known as the NATO Doppelbeschluss [Double-Track Decision]–provoked anger and fear, sparking a revival of the anti-nuclear peace movement across Germany. This culminated in the largest peace demonstration in the history of the Federal Republic on 10 October 1981 when 300,000 demonstrators converged in 3000 buses and 41 special chartered trains on the capital Bonn to protest the arms race (Wienecke-Janz 2008, p. 200). The rest of Europe showed its solidarity by staging peace demonstrations and rallies: in Brussels some 100,000 marched on the streets, 250,000 protested in London and half a million in Italy, as well as a half a million in Amsterdam. This also coincided

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with the peace camp that women established in Greenham Common in Britain at a military base (Cortright 2008, p. 147). Germany was in an unenviable position sandwiched between two superpowers who seemed poised on the brink of nuclear war. Without the protection of American bases and nuclear missiles, it was of course vulnerable to attack from the Soviet Union, which left unchecked was in danger of winning the arms race, although ‘winning’ of course took on an ambivalent meaning in nuclear diplomacy. However, the deployment of NATO missiles on German soil along the frontline of the Cold War seemed to only exacerbate that risk of nuclear war. In the immediate postwar era Germany had been a pawn in the Cold War (cf. Schwarz 2010, p. 136). In 1981, Germans felt they were pawns yet again and they rebelled. As Tony Judt writes of the opposition to the arms race: The opposition was greatest in West Germany where the Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was forced to step down after the left-wing of his own party voted against the new missiles…. The mirage of a de-nuclearized, neutral zone in central Europe was still dear to many Germans … (Judt 2007, p. 591)

On 24 April 1982, only six months after the unprecedented peace demonstrations across Western Europe in which ordinary citizens protested, the ESC was held in Harrogate in England. The German delegation’s choice of a song about peace could hardly have come at a more opportune time following rapidly on the heels of the immense groundswell of support for de-escalating the Euromissile crisis. Nicole’s performance of ‘Ein bißchen Frieden’ struck a chord with juries, scoring a total of 161 points, some 60 points more than the runner up. Germany received 8, 10 or 12 points from virtually every country with the exception of the Netherlands which gave it 6 points, Austria 1 point, and Luxembourg which gave it none. There had been peace rallies in the Netherlands but this solidarity did not translate into votes at Eurovision, possibly because memories of Germany as an aggressor in war overshadowed perceptions of Germany as a victim. The same possibly holds for Austria, which saw itself as ‘Hitler’s first victim’ (Judt 2007, p. 2) and Luxembourg, which had also been occupied by Nazi Germany and after 1945 was keen to be part of a ‘Little Europe’ without Germany (Judt 2007, p. 155).

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The overwhelming vote of support in 1982 at ESC is indicative of the popularity of the theme of peace, since all of Europe felt implicated in the arms race, but it was also in recognition of Germany’s plight as a largely helpless victim of Cold War superpower geopolitics. This was not an angry plea to withdraw NATO troops from German soil, or a nationalistic cry for sovereignty after almost forty years of Allied occupation. This was not even a patriotic call for German unification, a topic that was never to occupy the mainstream of public discourse until it became a reality in 1990. There was nothing conventionally nationalistic or patriotic about the song and its message, and nothing that alluded to missiles or arms in its staging or costumes. This was also not a counter-cultural act or performance, which might have polarised the audience. Nicole was not a peace activist, just an ordinary young girl with ordinary hopes and aspirations. Germany’s secret to success surely lay in the broadening of the song’s and the singer’s appeal, and in raising the song’s message beyond geopolitics to a universal level. The fact that Nicole was a girl who was only 17 years old certainly helped to enhance the song’s message. A feminine performer representing a formerly aggressive world power was sure to soften the nation’s projected image, and worked to allay any fears that Germany was thereby asserting itself as a European power. Germany appeared in every aspect of Nicole’s performance as a tamed and chastened defeated power, who was simply begging not to be sacrificed in a new war. If the Eurovision entry did speak to German patriotism, which the win most surely did, then this was a form of post-national or post-conventional patriotism. Moreover, the image projected of Germany was that of a European Germany, peace-loving and pacified.

German Victory in ESC in 2010: Germany as Good European or a German Europe? Germany’s fortunes in Eurovision fluctuated throughout the rest of the eighties and nineties and into the new millennium. Unsurprisingly, it did best when Ralph Siegel was involved, as the songwriter of the song ‘Lass die Sonne in dein Herz’ [Let the sun into your heart] in 1987, which came second, and the composer of ‘Wir geben ‘ne Party’ [We are throwing a party] in 1994, which came third. In 1999 Siegel’s composition ‘Reise nach Jerusalem —kudüs’e seyahat’ [Trip to Jerusalem], sung in a mix of languages including Turkish and Hebrew, came third.

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After German reunification in 1990, and the expansion of the ESC throughout the 90s to include the newly independent Baltic states, Poland, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and the Balkan states, Germany, like the UK, only scored sporadically well. By 2010, another win for Germany was considered to be ‘long overdue’ (Die Welt 2010). With the involvement of musician, producer, comedian and television entertainer Stefan Raab in 2000 and 2004, Germany managed to return to the top half of the leader board, after disappointing results between 2005 and 2009 when Raab was not involved. In 2010 Raab returned as collaborator with the national broadcaster ARD/NDR to produce a talent show ‘Unser Song für Oslo’ [Our Song for Oslo], which selected Lena and the song ‘Satellite.’ Raab was possibly inspired by the FIFA World Cup, which Germany hosted in 2006, and which fuelled renewed national pride and a certain fun kind of patriotism, as if many people had been holding such sentiments in for a while. A new safe kind of patriotism emerged, so-called ‘partyotism’ and ‘benevolent patriotism’ (Schiller 2015, p. 177), which was ‘good-natured, festive and lighthearted’ (Schiller 2015, p. 177). Germany fared well at the World Cup, finishing in third place, and Raab hosted special World Cup editions of his late-night comedy show TV Total on ProSieben throughout. As Peter Rehberg has argued, Raab ‘tried to mobilize a repressed sense of Germanness’ and repeatedly compared Eurovision to football ‘whose fan culture is stubbornly homophobic’ (Rehberg 2013, p. 182). Already before the ESC competition, the ARD was optimistic that Germany had a good chance of placing at least fourth in the contest, mainly based on Raab’s proven track record (Herres 2010). It was thought it could even break through the block voting of the ‘BalkanConnection,’ the ‘Nordlichter-Fraktion’ [northern-lights-fraction] and the former member states of the Soviet Union (Herres 2010). Some media outlets spoke in advance of the contest of Raab’s infectious enthusiasm for Eurovision and his impact in terms of ‘ein kleiner Patriotismus’ [a little patriotismus] like that which can be seen at mass sporting events (Jauch 2010), thus chiming in with the consensus that it was now permissible for Germans to display a post-national or post-conventional form of patriotism. The choice of the 18-year old Lena MeyerLandrut, who had not even finished school, proved a stroke of genius, with her song shooting up the charts in advance of the contest. Her ‘perky girlishness’ (Rehberg 2013, p. 178) and charm were infectious,

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reminding some of Audrey Hepburn (Jauch 2010), although there were critics such as former contestant Lou who declared that Lena could not sing and that she would end up last (Jauch 2010). One communications expert proved especially prescient when he wondered whether Lena’s unpretentious image may be the new image (of femininity) that Europe needed in times of crisis: ‘Es gibt womöglich eine neue europäische Empfindlichkeit, in der genau dieser Typ ankommt’ [There is possibly a new European sensitivity to whom precisely this type will appeal] (Jauch 2010). He was proved right. While Germany was most likely assured of a good placing with Raab’s involvement, even representatives of the ARD barely dared to hope for a top ten placing or at best fourth position (Herres 2010). In Germany the ‘Lena-hype’ was palpable, and an ARD representative declared he was a hopeless Lena fan or ‘Lenastheniker,’ a play on the German word ‘Legastheniker’ which means dyslexic (Herres 2010). The press reported on her ‘magnetism,’ her ‘charming nature,’ her ‘naturalness,’ which galvanised young and old (Herres 2010). Yet, Lena’s singing was far from polished. Having been schooled in London, Lena spoke English with a part Cockney inflection, part New Zealand or Australian accent, that was endearing and helped to set her apart. Infelicities in English pronunciation, which are a common feature of Eurovision, can easily work against a contestant, say, from Eastern Europe. With Lena, it only served to enhance her rather unpretentious cheeky image, giving it a cosmopolitan feel. The whole performance, from choice of singer and song, as well as all aspects of the staging, were carefully choreographed and calibrated. Each of the elements of the multimodal performance worked in harmony with the others. The focus of the performance was squarely on Lena herself, who was shown from all angles in close up, from behind and the side, almost as if the camera was in orbit around her. Lena’s knock-kneed dancing, bobbing up and down and throwing her arms around her in an awkward uncoordinated manner suggested here was a young gawky teenager bopping away in her living room to her favourite song. She was dressed simply in a plain short black dress, like a teenager who wants to dress up but doesn’t quite know how to be grown up. Yet, as a discrete flash of a small tattoo under her arm revealed, Lena was still a modern girl of the times, indeed, perhaps she represented a new European sensitivity. The song suited her voice and image perfectly, and told of hopeless teenage crushes. Here Germany passed as female,

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but this time as a fun-loving, cute and slightly quirky adolescent, rather than as a poker-faced girl concerned for the future. Eurovision had not seen the likes of such a stripped back, un-camp performance since the sixties with Sandy Shaw and France Galle. In 2010, the rather retro image Germany projected with Lena stood out, whether it was designed to or not, against the camp, glamour and glitter, and the bulk of the other acts which were spectacular and extravagant. Raab had, in the eyes of one critic, ‘straighten[ed] up the event as a whole’ (Rehberg 2013, p. 178), ‘decamped’ and ‘dequeered’ it in a way that did not sit well with its fans (Rehberg 2013, p. 179). What undoubtedly assisted in Germany’s 2010 victory were geopolitics and the fallout from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in the Eurozone. Only weeks before the final on 29 May 2010 in Oslo, the German Bundestag passed the first bailout package for Greece on May 7, 2010 in an expedited process, and agreed to loans of 22.4 billion Euro (Deutscher Bundestag 2010a). On 21 May, the Bundestag agreed to an EU rescue package of up to 750 billion Euro in guarantees with a German contribution of 123 billion Euro (Deutscher Bundestag 2010b). The rescue package was not only necessary to save Greece—it was described by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble as ‘without alternative’—it was also essential for the ordo-liberal German idea of Europe, and above all to stabilise the Euro (Deutscher Bundestag 2010a). But the measure was criticised by the opposition, who feared austerity measures imposed on Greece would only worsen the situation (Deutscher Bundestag 2010a). The debate also reopened rifts between France and Germany (Traynor 2010). With news of the German parliament’s two bailout decisions fresh in European’s minds, it is no surprise that voters and juries in Oslo were positively disposed towards Germany and awarded Lena a total of 246 points. While we cannot establish direct causality between these political decisions and Germany’s win at Eurovision, these two events do seem correlated. Moreover, Germany scored well with those countries most affected by the GFC, receiving 12 points from Spain, 8 points from Ireland (who had not required a bailout), and 1 point from Portugal. Interestingly, France, which had competing visions of the Eurozone, only gave Lena 3 points, suggesting old rivalries in the EU and in the ESC may have come into play. Research on political culture in ESC has shown that on the whole France and German do not form voting pairs that reciprocate votes, despite being immediate neighbours.

40  A. LEWIS

From 1975 to 1997 France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands formed a weak cluster of ‘voting friends’ that exchanged votes but from 1998 to 2012 France was more likely to vote for Spain or Portugal than Germany (Charron 2013, p. 490). The so-called ‘northern-lights-fraction’ voted overwhelmingly for Germany, with Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Estonia giving Germany 12 points. Even the so-called ‘Balkan Connection’ was generous, with Albania and Slovenia giving Germany 10 points, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia awarding 8 points, and Croatia 6 points. Tellingly, given the dire economic straits of the Greek economy, and the understandable ambivalence towards the strict terms of the bailout and the proposed austerity measures it would bring, Greece, which had come second in the 1st semi-final, only awarded Germany as ‘the EU’s traditional paymaster’ (The Guardian) 2 points. Germany received no points from a disproportionate number of countries not in the EU or in the Eurozone, such as Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia and Israel, which seems to indicate that in these countries Germany’s bailout vote played no significant role in swaying voters. Conversely, of all thirty-three countries that awarded between 1 and 12 points to Germany, 25 or 76% were EU member states or in the Schengen zone. Of all the 34 participants in Oslo, however, only 68% were members of the EU, the Eurozone or in Schengen. This would point to the fact that the EU members voted disproportionally in favour of Germany, and could be read as the result of a slight positive bias among EU members towards Germany. In 2010 Germany’s image-making during Eurovision continued in the tradition of its first success with Nicole, which also came at a time of geopolitical crisis in Europe. Germany’s self-presentation was commensurate with being a good European, and its self-perception as a European Germany. Its strategy was to scale back the glamour and glitz as well as the staging of the act, and to eschew the use of all signifiers of national belonging, even in the instrumentation. By contrast with the other top five acts in 2010, which were either all extravagantly staged, with spectacular sequinned, leather or tulle costumes or elaborately choreographed, some using pyrotechnics, Germany’s performance itself seemed to signal a commitment to austerity. In showing tasteful restraint at a time when Germany was imposing economic austerity on others, Germany presented itself as a good respectful neighbour. Here was Germany passing as feminine and in a fun party mood that was reminiscent of the new self-confident Germany that millions

2  GERMANY AS GOOD EUROPEAN … 

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of footballs fans had come to love in 2006. If Germany had already begun to see itself, as did sociologist Ulrich Beck, as representative of a new Europe that was being recast in a German mould, then none of this spoiled Europe’s celebration of a German victory at ESC in 2010. A German Europe, as long as it masqueraded in the benign guise of Lena, was something citizens of Europe had no trouble swallowing or contemplating. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, however, this was no longer the case, and Germany’s winning recipe in 2010 no longer guaranteed success. By the time of the second and third bailouts of Greece, Germany’s image as the hard paymaster of Europe had been cemented, and no softening of its image through sending female singers could alter that. Germany seemed destined in those three years 2015–2017, when it came twenty-seventh, twenty-sixth and twenty-fifth respectively, to be cast in the image of the tough European and the heartless hegemon. Europe no longer particularly liked the European Germany it saw, and no longer wanted to be part of a German Europe, as Beck had foreseen in 2013. In 2018, however, this changed when Germany sent a better act and surprised everyone by coming 4th with the Ed-Sheeran-like Michael Schulte and his own composition ‘You let me walk alone’. This act adhered like those before it to the proven recipe of sending modern, western-sounding, highly commercial music which does not foreground its Germanness.

Conclusion Germany provides a good case study of how national-identity formation and Europeanisation dovetail in the ESC in the instance of a large European nation with a dark and troubled history of imperialism, occupation and violence in relation to two World Wars and the Holocaust. The cultural domain affords Germany with an important means of atoning for the Nazi past, allowing it to demonstrate a thoroughly reformed image of the nation as a pacified democratic neighbour in a peaceful Europe. In the history of the ESC Germany has from the outset foregrounded its Europeanness and downplayed its Germanness, a strategy it has not deviated from. In stressing its non-Germanness, it has still managed to signal to its neighbours that it takes the contest very seriously as a forum for cultural exchange and community building without overtly displaying worrisome signs of competitiveness that may awaken old memories of German hegemony. Its most successful entries owe much to its rather self-effacing self-imagining as Western, peace-loving,

42  A. LEWIS

and as a responsible global citizen. Germany has also been successful when it performs a nonthreatening, fun-loving and female form of national-identity. Germany’s postwar image-makeover is frequently rewarded by Eurovision judges and audiences when Germany is seen as vulnerable and under threat as in the Cold War, or when German economic might is most appreciated as in the first bailout in the Eurozone crises. Here Germany’s self-image and the image others have of the country align and are mutually reinforced. In the 80s, the image of Germany was of a European Germany, whereas in 2010 and 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, Germany’s vision of Europe as performed in the ESC was of a German Europe. In 2010 this was still a positive concept reinforced by those countries most affected by the GFC when they gave votes to Germany. By 2015, 2016 and 2017, however, there was growing scepticism about Germany’s hegemony in Europe and negativity about the spectre of a German Europe that played out in Germany’s repeated poor placings in ESC. While Germany managed to redeem itself in 2018 by sending a sincere, heartfelt song about family values presented by a male singer, it remains to be seen whether the continuing refugee crisis, the spectre of Brexit and the rise of the far-right in Europe will not have an adverse effect on Germany’s future fortunes in Eurovision. ESC will most likely continue to serve as a cultural barometer of Europe’s deeply ambivalent attitudes to Germany as Europe’s most powerful economic power on the one hand, and as a chastened, tamed, peaceful power on the other hand. While Germany has displayed a remarkably consistent form of nation branding through the contest, the fluctuations in the reception of its performances are likely to remain a feature of Eurovision for some time to come.

Note 1. Judt argues that the view “that the ultimate blame for the horrors of World War Two must fall on German shoulders” was widespread and means that Austria was exempt from pressures to join the ESCS (Judt 2007, p. 52).

References Balirano, G (2017) ‘Who’s Afraid of Conchita Wurst? Drag Performers and the Construction of Multimodal Prosody’, in M G Sindoni, J Wildfeuer, and K O’Halloran (eds) Mapping Multimodal Performance Studies, 154–179. London and New York: Routledge.

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Baumgartner, M (2007) ‘Chanson, Canzone, Schlager, and Song: Switzerland’s Identity Struggle in the Eurovision Song Contest’, in I Raykoff and R D Tobin (eds) A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, 37–48. Aldershot: Ashgate. Beck, U (2013) German Europe. Trans. R Livingstone. Malden, MA, and Cambridge: Polity Press. Bracher, K D (2001) Geschichte als Erfahrung: Betrachtungen zum 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Deutscher Verlags-Anstalt. Charron, N (2013) ‘Impartiality, Friendship-Networks and Voting Behaviour: Evidence from Voting Patterns in the Eurovision Song Contest’, Social Networks, 35, 484–497. Collins, R (1998) From Satellite to Single Market: New Communication Technology and European Public Service Television. London and New York: Routledge. Cortright, D (2008) Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crawford, B, Brady, J, and Wiliarty, S (1999) ‘Germany Transformed? A Framework for Analysis’, in J S Brady, B Crawford, and S Wiliarty (eds) The Postwar Transformation of Germany: Democracy, Prosperity, and Nationhood, 1–31. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Deutscher Bundestag (2010a) Bundestag stimmt Griechenlandhilfe zu. https:// www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2010/29673660_kw18_de_ griechenland_2/201688. Accessed 20 September 2018. Deutscher Bundestag (2010b) Bundestag beschließt den Euro-Rettungsschirm. https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2010/29882585_ kw20_de_bankenrichtlinie/201796. Accessed 20 September 2018. Farges, P (2011) ‘Kitsch-Parade: Der deutsche Schlager zwischen Ur-Kult und Kultur’, in O Agard, C Helmreich, and H Vinckel-Roisin (eds) Das Populäre: Untersuchungen zu Interaktionen und Differenzierungsstrategien in Literatur, Kultur und Sprache, 205–211. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Galpin, C (2015) ‘Has Germany “Fallen Out of Love” with Europe? The Eurozone Crisis and the “Normalization” of Germany’s European Identity’, German Politics and Society, 33 (1/2), 25–41. Garton Ash, T (2012) ‘Angela Merkel Needs All the Help She Can Get’, The Guardian, 8 February. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/angela-merkel-all-help-can-get. Accessed 18 September 2018. Georgiou, M (2008) ‘“In the End Germany Will Always Resort to Hot Pants”: Watching Europe Singing, Constructing the Stereotype’, Popular Communication, 6, 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405700802198188. Germond, C and Türk, H (2008) ‘Introduction: Old Foes and New Friends’, in C Germond and H Türk (eds) A History of Franco-German Relations in

44  A. LEWIS Europe: From “Hereditary Enemies” to Partners, 1–10. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herf, J (1997) Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Herres, V (2010) ‘Ich bin bekennender Lenastheniker’, Tagesspiegel, 23 May. Hindrichs, T (2007) ‘Chasing the “Magic” Formula for Success: Ralph Siegel and the Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson’, in I Raykoff and R D Tobin (eds) A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, 49–60. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hurley, A W (2009) The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Jauch, K (2010) ‘Eurovision Song Contest: Der kleine Patriotismus’, Thüringer Allgemeine, 6 April. Judt, T (2007) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Pimlico. Kelly, M J (2016) Prosecuting Corporations for Genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morris, B S (1966 [2012]) Authority and Control in International Communism 1917–1967. New Brunswick and London: Atherton Press. Munte, V G (2008) ‘A New Framework for Franco-German Relations Through European Institutions, 1950 to 1954’, in C Germond and H Türk (eds) A History of Franco-German Relations in Europe: From “Hereditary Enemies” to Partners, 165–175. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Nicole gratuliert Lena doch zu Eurovision-Sieg’ (2010) Die Welt, 30 May. Nonn, C (2012) ‘Der Schlager und die westdeutsche Gesellschaft nach 1945’, in S Mecking and Y Wasserloos (eds) Musik, Macht, Staat: kulturelle, soziale und politische Wandlungsprozesse in der Moderne, 259–285. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Pensky, M (1995) ‘Universalism and the Situated Critic’, in S K White (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, 67–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollock, D K and Woods, D L (2015) ‘A Study in International Communication: Eurovision’, Journal of Broadcasting, 3 (2), 101–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 08838155909385866. Rehberg, P (2013) ‘Taken by a Stranger: How Queerness Haunts Germany at Eurovision’, in K Fricker and M Gluhovic (eds) Performing the New Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, 178–193. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Remy, S P (2002) The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Risse, T (2010) A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

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Risse, T and Engelmann-Martin, D (2002) ‘Identity Politics and Integration: The Case of Germany’, in A Pagden (ed) The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, Vol. 13, 287–316. Washington, DC: Wilson Woodrow Centre. Schiller, K (2015) ‘Siegen für Deutschland: Patriotism, Nationalism and the German National Football Team, 1954–2014’, Historical Social Research, 40 (4), 176–196. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.40.2015.4.176-196. Schwarz, H-P (2010) ‘The Division of Germany 1945–1949’, in M P Leffler and O A Westad (eds) The Cambridge History of the Cold War Volume 1 Origins, 133–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Torres, G (2011) ‘Pan-European, National, Regional and Minority Identities in the Eurovision Song Contest’, in M Sükösd and K Jakubowicz (eds) Media, Nationalism and European Identities. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 247–268. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7829/j.ctt12823p.12. Accessed September 23, 2018. Traynor, I (2010) ‘Germany Demands Austerity, Not Bailout, for Spendthrift Athens’, The Guardian, 11 February. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2010/feb/11/germany-france-euro-greece-bailout. Vuletic, D (2018) Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Wienecke-Janz, D (2008) Die große Chronik der Weltgeschichte: Das Ende des OstWest-Konflikts 1973–1989. Gütersloh and Munich: Wissen Media.

CHAPTER 3

‘Making Your Mind Up’: Britain, Europe and Eurovision-Scepticism Ben Wellings, Zoë Jay and Catherine Strong

Introduction A persistent strand in British thought about European integration ­portrays Europe as a zone for losers: those who lost the War and those who could not aspire to the same level of greatness (musical or otherwise) as the United Kingdom. On one level, the history of Britain’s involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest can be read as a metaphor for its involvement in the process of European integration: early promise gave way to disappointment, disillusion and scepticism.

B. Wellings (*)  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Z. Jay  University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Strong  RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_3

47

48  B. WELLINGS ET AL.

But beyond this analogy, an analysis of Eurovision as an element of European integration illuminates something more about British—or more accurately English—Euroscepticism. That is that Euroscepticism in England is more than just a political phenomenon. It is part of an attitude towards Europe—not just the European Union (EU)—that helps explain the links between national identity and Euroscepticism and offers insight into the embedded and persistent nature of this phenomenon in England.

England’s Europe: A Continent for Losers In the first years of the twenty-first century, neither the EU nor the Eurovision Song Contest was particularly popular in England. In 2017, a poll of 1650 Britons by the polling company YouGov found that 56% of survey respondents wanted the UK to leave the Eurovision Song Contest. This figure closely corresponded to the 52% of voters who opted to leave the EU in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU the year before. What we might call ‘Eurovision-scepticism’ correlated overwhelmingly with political attitudes: 76% of Leave voters were in favour of taking the UK out of Eurovision. Those who had voted to remain in the UK in 2016 were more favourably disposed to Eurovision with 65% in favour of remaining in the competition. But these figures only reflected those who cared one way or another. British indifference as opposed to hostility was revealed by the fact that only 22% of respondents intended to watch the show in 2017. Of those planning to tune into the biggest song contest in the world, 26% said their main reason for watching was Graham Norton’s ‘amusing commentary’. 19% confessed that they were planning to make fun of the show and just 9% of respondents were planning to tune in because they liked the music (YouGov 2017). Such attitudes were not new. One of the United Kingdom’s most prominent Brexiteers and leader of the official Leave campaign in 2016, Daniel Hannan MEP, articulated this long-standing British disdain for Eurovision ahead of the 2014 elections to the European Parliament that saw ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Eurosceptic parties and candidates win 26% of the 751 seats in the European Parliament. ‘When I was a small boy’, Hannan reminisced

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I liked to imagine that foreigners took the Eurovision Song Contest seriously. We Brits knew that the thing was a kitsch joke, I reasoned, but not everyone had our sense of humour. Indeed, our pleasure in the grotesque gallimaufry was subtly enhanced by the thought that, in places like Delft or Dortmund, people were earnestly cheering on their national entries. In fact, of course, the show is watched in pretty much the same spirit everywhere. Maybe this wasn’t obvious in the Sixties or Seventies, when travel was expensive; but it’s unmistakable in the age of Twitter. (Hannan 2014)

Similarly, in 2018 pro-Brexit MP Michael Fabricant hoped that Brexit meant that the UK would also leave Eurovision (cited in Hunt 2018). Although claimed by Hannan as a pan-European phenomenon, this ‘Eurovision-scepticism’ pre-dated the Brexit referendum of 2016 and was part of a wider culture that defined Britain in opposition to Europe. By 2008 there were open calls for Britain to withdraw from Eurovision. The reasons for such calls were a mixture of persistent poor performance since 1999, and accusations of opaque governance and voting. A phone poll carried out by The Express after the 2008 contest revealed that 98% of respondents wanted Britain to leave (Stretton 2008). This Sovietstyle majority should not come as a surprise given the editorial views on Europe of The Express, which four years later launched a ‘crusade’ to get Britain to leave the EU. Nonetheless Sir Terry Wogan, the voice of Britain’s light-hearted (and sometimes inebriated) Eurovision commentary from 1971 to 2008, said Britain should consider its participation in future Eurovision Song Contests very carefully, warning that once bloc voting became entrenched, Britain had no natural blocs in Europe to support it (cited in Fricker 2013, p. 68). This was a new form of disdain for Eurovision: it had always been naff, but now it was corrupt and anti-British. Expanding on Simon Usherwood and Nick Startin’s notion of Euroscepticism as a ‘persistent and embedded phenomenon’ in contemporary European politics (Usherwood and Startin 2013, p. 13) we can understand ‘Eurovision-scepticism’ as being related to the way that opposition to ‘Europe’ is a persistent and embedded feature of contemporary English political culture, and which played a significant role in emergent expressions of nationhood at the start of the twenty-first century (Wellings 2012). Michael Kenny notes that ‘populist forms of Englishness signify a sullen, two-fingered response to the political establishment and its values … affording a rhetorically rich framework

50  B. WELLINGS ET AL.

for expressing a form of collective self-understanding’ (Kenny 2014, p. 118). Much of this hostility was directed at the EU, something that had become part of the establishment but increasingly seen as alien to England after 2010 (Wyn Jones et al. 2012, 2013). Thus the ‘indifference’ towards European integration identified by Virginie Van Ingelgom (Van Ingelgom 2014, p. 15) became more actively hostile in the UK and especially England in the years leading to the Brexit referendum (Henderson et al. 2017). This is all in a context where the politics of national identity within EU member-states is an important dynamic in the relations between nations, nationalism and forms of European integration (Lequesne 2018, p. 290). This politicisation of English identity in opposition to European integration should not be seen as a phenomenon related to politics alone. As Menno Spiering has argued, British Euroscepticism is ‘defined and inspired by cultural exceptionalism’, and ‘is never just about the European Union; it is about Europe and the Europeans who are collectively seen as essentially different’ (Spiering 2015, p. 30). Adopting such a culturally focused lens helps address a gap in the literature on the history of European integration identified by Wolfram Kaiser. Research on European integration has, in his view, ‘failed to make sufficient connections with either domestic contestation of EU policies or the Europeanization impact of integration on the member-states, their politics and societies’ (Kaiser 2010, p. 48). An analysis of UK-EU relations via the prism of British participation in Eurovision is well placed to address these concerns. Euroscepticism should be seen as more than just a political attitude towards the UK’s constitutional position within the EU or an antipathy towards foreigners bound up with growing levels of inequality. It is part of the construction of English nationhood whereby opposition to ‘Europe’ in its various institutional forms—the European Broadcasting Union (EBC) included—shapes British and especially English self-definition. The source of English disdain was the idea, prevalent in the English imaginary at the start of the twenty-first century that both the Eurovision Song Contest and the EU were for losers. Evidence of political disdain towards European integration was present from its tentative inter-War beginnings. In 1931 the British Colonial Secretary Leo Amery noted that

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The essence of the Pan European idea was to create a European patriotism over and above that which was now felt for individual countries, or which was insufficient in itself for some of the countries in post-war Europe that were discontented with their reduced and isolated positions. (Historical Archives of the European Union PAN/EU 000007)

The references to European integration appealing to governments of countries in ‘reduced and isolated positions’ suggested that Europe really was for those countries that had lost their positions of former greatness as a result of the First World War. This attitude persisted into official British attitudes in the early years of European integration, leading to Britain’s well-known lack of engagement at the Messina Conference of 1956 that ultimately led six other Western European states to form the European Economic Community (EEC). Yet this reduction in status ultimately befell the United Kingdom too, despite—and because of—its victory in 1945. The British arguments for joining the various expressions of European integration were always predicated on restoring leadership and ‘greatness’. But it was a message that bore within it an automatic admission of decline. Speaking in the ‘Great Debate’ on joining the EEC held in Parliament in October 1971 Conservative MP Norman St John Stevas expressed that melancholia for lost greatness: This is the moment of effective recognition that our imperial past lies behind us – that it is over and that this is the start of a new era. (Hansards 28 October 1971, vol. 823, col. 2174)

St. John Stevas’ argument illustrates how imperial greatness had been replaced by subordination into a polity that had been established by former allies and enemies, all of whom had experienced defeat between 1940 and 1945. European integration was, therefore, for those countries that had lost wars in 1940–1945. This ‘loser’ status applied even more to Eurovision. Eurovision was considered so far below the greatness of British pop music that it should best be left to Europeans who struggled to reach the levels of excellence attained by the country that was, by the mid1990s, self-consciously styling itself as the ‘pop workshop of the world’. This world was, however, predominantly Anglophone and was structured around a trans-Atlantic relationship. The history of popular music since the Second World War has often been conceptualised as an ongoing

52  B. WELLINGS ET AL.

dialogue between the US and the UK, with key innovative moments occurring on one side of the Atlantic in response to previous developments on the other. The rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, is characterised as rarely having input into this flow, but rather responding to and imitating the music that comes out of the UK and US, with suitable local adjustments (Regev 2013). The first decades of rock and roll provide an illustration—in histories, the next important moment following the emergence of rock and roll as a commercial force in 1955 is usually identified as ‘The British Invasion’ of the US market in the mid-1960s. This was the moment when British bands, most notably The Beatles, found success with a version of rock and roll that was recognisably indigenised, incorporating elements of British music traditions such as music hall in a way that produced a ‘whiter’ version of rock more focused on melody than rhythm (Stratton 2010). The global chart dominance of The Beatles for the rest of the 1960s, alongside other British bands such as The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones (the latter were marked as British despite their sound drawing far more heavily on the blues than their peers), established the nation’s reputation as a pop and rock powerhouse. This success also remade these new forms of popular music into a source of British pride rather than being seen as US cultural import. With British music as an essential part of a trans-Atlantic motor for pop music, the Eurovision Song Contest looked second rate at best. And yet, the performance of the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest since it first participated in 1957 has often been strong. Britain’s pop pedigree meant that success initially came easily. UK entrants performed strongly in Eurovision (see Table 3.1), with Britain’s success coinciding with their entry into the EEC but dropping off significantly from around the turn of the century. In addition to sharing the highest number of wins (five) with Sweden, the UK also boasts the highest number of second place rankings (fifteen), and has finished in the Top Five in twenty-nine of its sixty performances since 1957. This exceptional record is clearest in the ten-year period between 1967 and 1977, when the UK won three times, and its lowest ranking was fourth place (in 1971 and 1974). The 1970s were heady days for UK-Europe relations, both in Eurovision and for Britain as a new member of the EEC. Yet the UK’s performance record steadily declined, and its relationship with Eurovision soured since the success of the 1970s; although the UK

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Table 3.1  UK participation and performance at the Eurovision Song Contest, 1956–2018 Year

Location

1956 1957

Frankfurt

1958 1959

Cannes

1960

London

1961 1962

Cannes Luxembourg

1963

London

1964

Copenhagen

1965 1966

Naples Luxembourg

1967 1968 1969 1970

Vienna London Madrid Amsterdam

1971

Dublin

1972

Edinburgh

1973

Luxembourg

1974

Brighton

1975 1976

Stockholm The Hague

Performer Did not participate Patricia Bredin Did not participate Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson Bryan Johnson The Allisons Ronnie Carroll Ronnie Carroll Matt Monro

Song

Place (total in final)

‘All’

7 (10)

6

‘Sing Little Birdie’

2 (11)

16

‘Looking High, High, High’ ‘Are You Sure?’ ‘Ring-a-ding Girl’

2 (13)

25

2 (16) 4 (16)

24 10

4 (16)

28

2 (16)

17

2 (18) 9 (18)

26 8

1 (17) 2 (17) 1 (16) 2 (12)

47 28 18 26

4 (18)

98

2 (18)

114

3 (17)

123

4 (17)

14

2 (19) 1 (18)

138 164

‘Say Wonderful Things’ ‘I Love the Little Things’ Kathy Kirby ‘I Belong’ Kenneth ‘A Man Without McKellar Love’ Sandie Shaw ‘Puppet on A String’ Cliff Richard ‘Congratulations’ Lulu ‘Boom Bang-a-bang’ Mary Hopkin ‘Knock, Knock (Who’s There?)’ Clodagh ‘Jack in The Box’ Rodgers The New ‘Beg, Steal or Seekers Borrow’ Cliff Richard ‘Power to All Our Friends’ Olivia ‘Long Live Love’ Newton-John The Shadows ‘Let Me Be the One’ Brotherhood ‘Save Your Kisses of Man for Me’

Points (total in final)

(continued)

54  B. WELLINGS ET AL. Table 3.1  (continued) Year

Location

Performer

Song

Place (total in final)

1977

London

‘Rock Bottom’

2 (18)

121

1978 1979 1980

Paris Jerusalem The Hague

Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran Co-Co Black Lace Prima Donna

11 (20) 7 (19) 3 (19)

61 73 106

1981

Dublin

1 (20)

136

1982 1983

Harrogate Munich

7 (18) 6 (20)

76 79

1984

Luxembourg

7 (19)

63

1985 1986

Gothenburg Bergen

4 (19) 7 (20)

100 72

1987 1988

Brussels Dublin

13 (22) 2 (21)

47 136

1989

Lausanne

2 (22)

130

1990

Zagreb

6 (22)

87

1991

Rome

10 (22)

47

1992

Malmö

2 (23)

139

1993

Millstreet

2 (25)

164

1994

Dublin

10 (25)

63

1995

Dublin

10 (23)

76

1996

Oslo

8 (23)

77

1997

Dublin

1 (25)

227

1998 1999

Birmingham Jersualem

2 (25) 12 (23)

166 38

‘The Bad Old Days’ ‘Mary Ann’ ‘Love Enough for Two’ Bucks Fizz ‘Making Your Mind Up’ Bardo ‘One Step Further’ Sweet Dreams ‘I’m Never Giving Up’ Belle and the ‘Love Games’ Devotions Vikki ‘Love Is…’ Ryder ‘Runner in The Night’ Rikki Only the Light’ Scott ‘Go’ Fitzgerald Live Report ‘Why Do I Always Get It Wrong’ Emma ‘Give a Little Love Back to The World’ Samantha ‘A Message to Your Janus Heart’ Michael Ball ‘One Step Out of Time’ Sonia ‘Better the Devil You Know’ Frances ‘We Will Be Free Ruffelle (Lonely Symphony)’ Love City ‘Love City Groove’ Groove Gina G ‘Ooh…Aah…Just a Little Bit’ Katrina and ‘Love Shine a Light’ The Waves Imaani ‘Where Are You?’ Precious ‘Say It Again’

Points (total in final)

(continued)

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Table 3.1  (continued) Year

Location

Performer

2000

Stockholm

Nicki French

2001

Copenhagen

2002 2003 2004

Tallinn Riga Istanbul

2005 2006 2007

Kyiv Athens Helsinki

2008

Belgrade

2009 2010

Moscow Oslo

2011 2012

Düsseldorf Baku

2013 2014

Malmö Copenhagen

2015

Vienna

2016 2017

Stockholm Kyiv

2018

Lisbon

Song

‘Don’t Play That Song Again’ Lindsay D. ‘No Dream Impossible’ Jessica Garlick ‘Come Back’ Jemini ‘Cry Baby’ James Fox ‘Hold on To Our Love’ Javine ‘Touch My Fire’ Daz Sampson ‘Teenage Life’ Scooch ‘Flying the Flag (For You)’ Andy ‘Even If’ Abraham Jade Ewen ‘It’s My Time’ Josh ‘That Sounds Good to Me’ Blue ‘I Can’ Engelbert ‘Love Will Set You Humperdinck Free’ Bonnie Tyler ‘Believe in Me’ Molly ‘Children of the Universe’ Electro Velvet ‘Still in Love with You’ Joe and Jake ‘You’re Not Alone’ Lucie Jones ‘Never Give Up on You’ SuRie ‘Storm’

Place (total in final)

Points (total in final)

16 (24)

28

15 (23)

28

3 (24) 26 (26) 16 (24)

111 0 29

22 (24) 19 (24) 22 (24)

18 25 19

25 (25)

14

5 (25) 25 (25)

173 10

11 (25) 25 (26)

100 12

19 (26) 17 (26)

23 40

24 (27)

5

24 (26) 15 (26)

62 111

24 (26)

48

continued to perform well throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the country’s last win was in 1997, performed by the US act Katrina and the Waves. Whilst the overall trend in scores was downward, there was a noticeable change after 2003, when Jemini scored the dreaded nul points. This shift occurred at an important juncture in UK-EU relations with the decision not to join the single currency and the decision to invade Iraq. From this time on UK acts, with one exception in 2009, consistently finished in the bottom half of the grand final rankings and came last on three occasions (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2).

56  B. WELLINGS ET AL. &ŝƌƐƚ WůĂĐĞ

>ĂƐƚ WůĂĐĞ

Fig. 3.1  UK placings at the Eurovision Song Contest 1958–2018, normalised. Placements are normalised to a percentage/place out of 100 to account for different numbers of competitors each year affecting the relative position of some placings (Source Compiled by Zoë Jay)

&ŝƌƐƚ WůĂĐĞ

dŽƉ ϱ DŝĚĚůĞ ŽĨ ƚŚĞ WĂĐŬ ŽƩŽŵ ϱ >ĂƐƚ WůĂĐĞ ŝĚ EŽƚ WĂƌƟĐŝƉĂƚĞ

Fig. 3.2  UK placings at the Eurovision Song Contest 1958–2018 by place category (Source Compiled by Zoë Jay)

Throughout this musical decline was a sense of British—although increasingly English—difference from Europe articulated through a memory of the past that was at odds with the ‘Euro-myth’ (Wellings and Power 2016, p. 157) or ‘Nobel narrative’ (Manners and Murray 2016,

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p. 185) that underpinned European integration and hence both the EU and Eurovision. Måns Zelmerlöw and Petra Mede caricatured that collusion between the EU’s founding myth and a formula for success at Eurovision with the interval act song ‘Peace, Peace, Love, Love’ in 2016. Yet this view of the past was challenged in the United Kingdom. Writing in Conservative Home in 2016 David Davis, still a backbencher at the outset of the referendum campaign before becoming the Minister for Exiting the EU from 2016–2018, wrote that ‘The European Union was a noble vision. It was borne out of Europe’s history: a history of war, conflict, tyranny and destruction’. Yet here British and European memories diverged in Davis’ narrative. ‘But this history is not our history’ he continued: Britain has its own proud tradition of fighting tyranny, of protecting liberty and democracy both at home and abroad. For us, Europe has always been about trade. For the continent, it is about so much more. This does not mean either side is wrong. But the European Project is not right for us. The Global Project is. (Davis 2016)

In sum, the UK’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest predated its membership of the European Communities and will outlast it. On one level, the UK’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest serves as a useful analogy for the UK’s membership of the EU, with early promise giving way to deep scepticism. Yet it is more than this alone. Examining the ambivalence in the UK towards Eurovision reveals the cultural and historical bases of Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom.

Puppet on a String: Aspiring to Europe The first level of analogy relates to the period of the United Kingdom government’s initial attempts to join the European Communities from 1961–1973. During this period, both Conservative and Labour governments found themselves like ‘puppets on a string’ as General de Gaulle vetoed UK accession in 1963 and 1967. But these political échecs were not reflected at another level of European integration when the United Kingdom not only established and joined the EBC in 1950, but enjoyed noticeable success in its flagship broadcast, the Eurovision Song Contest,

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in the 1960s. Britain may have been outside of the EEC, but it was very active in Eurovision. In the absence of membership of the European Communities, this cultural engagement assumed symbolic importance, signalling the UK’s ‘European’ credentials. Initially it also went against the grain of what Stephen George characterised as the ‘awkwardness’ that seemed to characterise the UK’s membership of the Common Market and its successors (George 1998). The dominant narrative of UK-EU relations stresses a profound ambiguity towards the project of European integration. Yet whilst we should avoid creating an ex post facto projection of hard Euroscepticism into the past, it remains true that British politics remained immune to the type of affective attachment to the idea of Europe carried by European federalists and other pro-Europeans, if not European citizens more broadly (Anderson 2009, p. 475). As Jeremy Black noted, in ideological and ideational terms Britons joined the European Economic Community without ever really buying into the broader, legitimating myths of European integration (Black 1994, p. 267). Chris Gifford argues that the structural origin of this ambivalent attitude was the ‘missing European rescue of the British nation-state’ that remained oriented outwards from Europe and resulted in only an instrumental acceptance of the European project (Gifford 2014, p. 15). However this narrative of ‘awkwardness’ needs modifying to reflect UK governments’ desires to join ‘Europe’ in all its guises during the 1960s. Like Britain’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, early engagement in the various possible forms of European integration suggested promise. Britain’s standing was high amongst the European political class that emerged from the Second World War. In the security realm, Britain played a leading role in creating the Brussels Treaty in 1948 that led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) the following year and the Western European Union (WEU) in 1950. Britain was also a leading actor in the creation of the EBU, but despite this the BBC demonstrated similar reserve to the UK government at the Messina Conference through its decision to not participate in the first Eurovision Song Contest in 1956. The reasons for Britain’s non-participation in 1956 are contested: the most common explanation is that the BBC intended to participate but did not submit a song in time; other rumours suggest that the UK preferred its own national competition, ‘The Festival of British Songs.’ When the EBU made

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changes to the format of the ESC in 1957 based on the BBC’s ‘Festival’, the UK entered the competition for the first time with Patricia Bredin’s song ‘All’. Bredin finished seventh out of ten performers, and although the BBC initially intended to submit a song the following year, the UK ultimately did not participate in 1958. Upon its return to the competition in 1959, however, the UK quickly established itself as a European pop music powerhouse—a status it held until the end of the twentieth century. The UK’s participation in the contest contrasted with Britain’s more serious global role as a great power of popular music as noted above: in the post-War era Britain’s musical greatness was a product of its transAtlantic rather than European ties. Musical events in 1967 underscored this Euro-Atlantic divergence. In 1967 the UK first won the Eurovision Song Contest with Sandy Shaw’s ‘Puppet on a String’. In the same year—when Britain’s second application to join the European Communities was again vetoed by President De Gaulle—The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Just as important as the internal and external resistance to British participation in European integration was the inherent admission that British participation in Eurovision (and ‘Europe’ more broadly) was a symbol of national decline. In this light, the Eurovision Song Contest could not be seen as a light-hearted expression of European togetherness and a showcase for new communications technologies, but only as an embarrassing reminder of a fall from greatness. Success in the 1970s—politically and musically— obscured this tension that eventually returned to political and cultural salience in the twenty-first century.

Brotherhood of Man: Britain and European Unity in the 1970s Although Andrew Roberts has described the years 1975–1976 as ‘undoubtedly the worst peacetime twenty-four months in the history of the English-speaking peoples’ (Roberts 2006, p. 4), from the point of view of the UK’s involvement in Eurovision and the European Communities these were halcyon days. The United Kingdom’s 1976 winning song was ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ by the appropriately fraternally named Brotherhood of Man. Such sentiments of European brotherhood appeared to be dominant less than one year before, when the

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United Kingdom voted to remain in the European Communities by a 2:1 margin in the referendum of June 1975. The spirit of international reconciliation that was one of the drivers of European integration in the thirty years after the end of World War II was evident in the British arm of the European Movement’s celebration of the UK’s accession to the EEC in 1973. Five hundred ‘Loving Cups’ were produced in fine bone china by the Spode company from Stoke-onTrent. ‘For two centuries’, it was explained, ‘two-handled “loving cups” have represented good fellowship’. Their name derived ‘from the custom of their communal use at gatherings when one would be used to pass drink from person to person, the two handles and large capacity facilitating the process’ (Historical Archives of the European Union EUF645). In addition to the cups, 5000 plates were produced in cobalt blue and 24-carat gold reflecting the colour of the European movement eventually enshrined in the EU flag in 1986. Yet even in friendship, memories of past enmity were never far away as the literature accompanying the commemorative crockery explained: The aim of unity within Europe is not a new phenomenon but previous attempts to achieve it have been based on dominance, not consent and have ended as they began, by force of arms. Despite the presence of so much common ground in history, religion and culture the forces of disunity have dominated Europe’s subsequent history, twice in recent times leading it to near destruction. (Historical Archives of the European Union EUF645)

Anticipating that the impending referendum on the Common Market would require a broader airing of pro-EEC arguments, the European Movement in Britain subsequently prepared leaflets that argued that the United Kingdom was both strong and free in Europe: Strong because we are now part of one of the most powerful economic and political groups of nations in the world. Free because our voice is not only heard, but it is listened to where it matters. And we are one of the decision makers. In Europe we have greater freedom. Freedom to move around and to work wherever we wish. Freedom to choose the goods we need. And freedom from want and war among us. (Historical Archives of the European Union EUF645)

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But not everyone in Britain was as positive about this new European brotherhood as the members of the European Movement. It was not so much that British politicians did not realise what they were getting themselves into when they voted to join the Common Market, but rather that they did so for very instrumental reasons. What convinced many politicians to support British accession was the notion that being part of an emerging bloc would restore Britain to a place of greatness in world affairs (Brown 1971, p. 209). Similarly when the Common Market referendum campaign began in the late spring of 1975, there was little evidence of pro-European sentiment as the basis of British engagement with Europe. Most arguments for staying in the EEC rested on material concerns about jobs and prosperity: the pro-EEC campaign group ‘Britain in Europe’ argued that if the UK left the EEC ‘We would be clinging to the shadow of British sovereignty while its substance flies out of the window’ (Britain in Europe 1975, p. 5). Even though the campaign to remain in the EEC was eventually successful, winning the poll on 5 June by 67% of the vote to 33% on a turnout of 65%, there was a good deal of popular ambivalence about ‘Europe’. Opinion polling revealed this apathy and uncertainty: ‘All respondents stressed the importance of not losing our own unique national identity’ reported the pollsters Boase Massimi Pollitt. They continued in summary: No one wanted us to become ‘an offshore island of Europe’. Britain was regarded as having a rather special historical heritage and this was in turn tied up with the monarchy; with our British individuality; with our ‘own way of doing things’. (Boase Massimi Pollitt Partnership 1975, p. 12)

The UK was in Europe, but only half-heartedly. The result of the referendum was unequivocal, but the affective connection was ambivalent. As in politics, so in art: from 1967–1981 the UK was as successful as it had ever been in Eurovision, but in the commercial world of popular music, it was the trans-Atlantic exchange the continued to define what was good about pop and rock.

Making Your Mind Up: The Emergence of Eurosceptic England In the wake of the 1975 referendum it seemed as if the issue of the United Kingdom’s membership of the Common Market had been resolved in the positive. The UK government continued to play a

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constructive role in Europe. By 1979 a British politician, Sir Roy Jenkins, even became President of the European Commission. But the electorate remained ambivalent about membership of the EEC and popular disquiet did not go away even if it was not politically salient. In 1981 Bucks Fizz followed the Brotherhood of Man’s winning ways with ‘Making Your Mind Up’. The ambivalence in the title characterises the transference of political ambivalence about European integration into a political ideology from the left to the right of British politics during the 1980s and a hardening of Eurosceptic attitudes. Mass Observation (MO) recorded public disquiet in a 1983 report reflecting on a decade of UK membership of the European Communities. The report summary noted ignorance of and indifference towards the EEC and its emergent institutions, citing poor coverage in the media and lack of education in schools for the unpopularity of the European Communities and especially the European Parliament, which had held its first direct elections in 1979. Metrification, introduced in 1971 ahead of EEC membership, was viewed with suspicion (MassObservation Archive, Special Directive 1982, ‘EEC Membership, Report on Material’). The MO report also found that any positive attitudes were highly conditional. The report’s authors noted that there was a general acceptance that the UK was in the EEC for the foreseeable future, but only because withdrawal was no longer a vote winner. ‘The bogus exaggerations of the Heath campaign [to join the EEC] have been discounted and cynicism many now be giving way to grudging recognition of the facts of geographical life’ noted one survey respondent (MassObservation Archive, Special Directive 1982, ‘EEC Membership, Report on Material’). These ‘facts of geographical life’ did not inspire much enthusiasm and the English always had other parts of the world to turn to for an affective internationalism: ‘there is an underlying support for the concept of Europe’, noted the MO report summary, ‘provided that it does not conflict too harshly with “kith and kin”’ in English-speaking countries (Mass-Observation Archive, Special Directive 1982, ‘EEC Membership, Report on Material’). The specific findings of the 1983 Special Directive on EEC Membership suggested that the British public had bought into Europe without buying into a deep sense of being European or developing a strong identification with the project of European integration. Mass Observation Respondent 34 noted that ‘Membership [of the EEC]

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seems a much more logical grouping geographically than does the Commonwealth but lacks the sentimental attachments to the latter’ (Mass-Observation Archive, Special Directive 1982, ‘EEC Membership’, Respondent 34). Respondent 114 was even more dismissive: As someone who has done unskilled manual work alongside indigenous (workers) I find some of the talk about Europe is somewhat romantic. It sounds like the outpourings of someone who has discovered the joys of drink, say a teenager, and feels awash with vague notions of ‘international solidarity’ and ‘ending national chauvinism’ …. (Mass-Observation Archive, Special Directive 1982 ‘EEC Membership’, Respondent 114)

In such an environment, the underlying integrative and affective purpose of the Eurovision Song Contest could not be well received. The 1970s are commonly remembered as a period of British decline. This is especially true for the Thatcherite—and therefore Eurosceptic— right in British politics. By the time she came to power in 1979, Margaret Thatcher—and her colleagues in the radical wing of the Conservative Party—had been working out an ideological program that would put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Britain’. Ultimately, this logic propelled Thatcher and her supporters towards a position of scepticism towards the European project and eventually towards outright opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU in the 1990s. Although far from presenting a Euro-rejectionist position, Thatcher articulated this new attitude towards European integration at the College of Europe in Bruges in 1988. Thatcher, angered by the positive reception recently accorded by the (UK) Trades Union Congress to European Commission President Jacques Delors, delivered a speech that offered an alternative vision of European integration to the view being argued for by the supranational Delors Commission. The British Prime Minister also reminded her audience in 1988 not only of the sacrifice of British soldiers in Belgium in the First World War, but also the role played by Britain in liberating the Continent from Nazi rule. ‘Had it not been for that willingness to fight and die, Europe would have been united long before now – but not in liberty, not in justice’ (Thatcher 1988). The British experience of costly victory in two world wars provided a different perspective on European integration than the lessons drawn by the continental powers that experienced defeat. The corollary of this position was a reassertion of ‘Atlanticism’ in British foreign policy and

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a re-emphasis on the Anglo-US ‘Special Relationship’ during the 1980s (although not the Commonwealth). But the assertion that the European Community was on the wrong side of history was delivered in the most famous part of the speech: Indeed it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, some in the Community seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels. (Thatcher 1988)

Thatcher’s speech galvanised resistance to European integration not seen since the 1970s, but this time predominantly on the right of British politics rather than the left. At a meeting of the newly constituted ‘Bruges Group’, former Labour Foreign Minister, David Owen, pitted the idea of nationhood and liberty against European integration. Owen told an audience in response to the collapse of Communist regimes at the end of the decade that ‘We saw in 1989 the flowering of nationhood in Eastern Europe, reminiscent of 1848’. He then picked up the refrain that European integration was on the wrong side of history: A European Community that decries nationhood goes against the grain of democratic politics… The fashionable political views within the Community, for the present moulded by Jacques Delors, are for a federalist Little Europe. It is a political fashion that it is Britain’s destiny to resist. (Owen 1990)

Despite this growing political resistance it should be noted that the period 1988–1994 was another golden period for British Eurovision entrants with the UK coming second in four of the six contests during that period. The early 1990s were also the high point of pro-EU sentiment in UK and across the EU12 (Taylor 2008, p. 26). Nevertheless, this political resistance laid the foundation for right-wing Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom, and ultimately paved the way for the campaign to leave the EU and the referendum vote of 2016. It also eventually spilled over into a disengagement from Eurovision manifested in the calls to leave the EBU-sponsored song contest after 2008.

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Nul Points: Towards English Disengagement The last of the UK’s five winning entrants—Love Shine a Light performed by the US band Katrina and the Waves—came in 1997. Yet after this, decline was rapid and dramatic, reaching a nadir in 2003, when Jemini’s ‘Cry Baby’ received the dreaded nul points. The song was widely criticised for being ‘dismally tuneless’, but British commentators were also quick to suggest that the UK was facing political retribution for having participated in the US-led invasion of Iraq only a few weeks earlier in the year (Wells 2003). Host of the BBC’s Eurovision coverage, Terry Wogan, asserted that ‘the United Kingdom is suffering from what we might call post-Iraq backlash’ (Telegraph 2003). Likewise, then-backbench Labour MP, Jeremy Corbyn, suggested that: … it could be that the song was just truly awful and deserved it, but I think there’s actually probably a deeper story here. People across Europe are fed up with Britain’s over-close relationship with the United States. (cited in Wells 2003)

The perception that Eurovision was dominated by politically motivated voting was similarly evident in British reactions to Lucie Jones’ postBrexit performance at the 2017 Contest. Jones was widely believed to have given the UK’s best performance in years, and although she placed higher than previous pre-Brexit entrants, still finished in a mediocre 15th place. Fans blamed her low ranking on Europeans ‘punishing’ the UK for leaving the EU, just as they had supposedly punished the UK with nul points after Iraq in 2003 (Wright 2017). Whether such ‘punitive voting’ against the UK was real or imagined, the UK’s underperformance and disengagement at Eurovision since 1998 correlated with a clear cooling off in the UK-EU political relationship. This phenomenon was not only political. This decline in engagement with Eurovision coincided with a period of nostalgically inclined musical prominence in the United Kingdom. By the 1990s, the UK had lost some of its cultural dominance in the sphere of popular music. Rap, a musical form very closely associated with American urbanity, was on the ascendency, and the sudden and colossal success of grunge, a genre emerging from the US north-west, further focussed attention on the United States in the first years of the decade. The emergence of Britpop, as characterised by bands such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp, was seen to be

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very much a response to these trends. Britpop drew heavily on n ­ ostalgic re-imaginings of music from the time of the British Invasion, in a way that has been characterised as ‘the assertion of a white, male, heterosexual Englishness’ because bands from Scotland, Ireland or Wales barely featured in discussions of Britpop (Bennett and Stratton 2010, p. 6). The conservativeness of Britpop was appealing not just because of its contrast to contemporary US styles, but because of the comforting image of Britishness it portrayed, linking past with present. Britpop bands emphasised accents, sang about uniquely British places and concerns and at times went so far as to deploy the Union Jack as part of their aesthetic. This proved to be politically useful for a newly elected New Labour government with its eye on the creative industries. However, the incorporation of the most recognisable Britpop stars into New Labour’s version of ‘Cool Britannia’ represented a demonstration of how Britpop removed ‘the distinctive “protest” element of Britishbased independent music’ (Huq 2010, p. 93) to make it more broadly appealing—reflecting New Labour’s attitudes towards its previous policy platform of the 1980s. The nostalgic impulse found in Britpop was a harbinger of the increasing focus on music’s past. Throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s British music became incorporated into heritage discourses, including, eventually, dance music, which had been very important in subcultural circles domestically but was not a significant part of Britain’s Eurovision identity. Important moments in British pop music history became markers of British pride: the prominence of such music in the opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics in 2012 serves as a highly visible manifestation of this trend (Roberts 2014). This merging of rock authenticity with mainstream politics reinforced a nostalgic version of English identity that chimed with increasingly stated political views that saw the UK’s future as a return to its ‘global’ past, rather than its ‘European’ present (Wellings and Baxendale 2015, p. 139). This was reinforced after the well-documented collapse of New Labour’s pro-Europeanism around the 2003 decision to invade Iraq and not to join the Euro (Gifford 2014). What was novel after 2003 was the development of a politicised English identity. Billy Bragg articulated calls for a ‘New England’ and Englishness at the turn of the millennium. His song ‘Take Down the Union Jack’ (2002) gave voice to sentiments associated with Englishness at the turn of the millennium:

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Britain isn’t cool you know, it’s really not that great It’s not a proper country, it don’t even have a patron saint It’s just an economic union that’s past its sell-by date. (Bragg 2002)

English secessionist sentiment was predominantly directed at the EU rather than the UK (PJ Harvey articulated a more Eurosceptic Englishness on the album Let England Shake during the following decade), but it grew out of a weakening sense of Britishness in the years after 2007 and was mobilised by the issue of Brexit (Henderson et al. 2017). As the Eurozone crisis deepened from 2010 a double critique of the EU’s input and output legitimacy was made in the United Kingdom with little resistance from pro-Europeans. The critique was not just about the Eurozone’s economic performance (the UK was not a member of the Eurozone), but was about the EU’s democratic credentials and its ‘foreignness’. In this context, a referendum on UK membership of the EU would, it was argued, restore decision-making power to the British people and the UK Parliament and thereby restore the legitimacy of the UK’s membership. It had the added benefit—according to its supporters—of restoring trust and reviving participation in democratic mechanisms within the UK after the expenses scandals of 2009. In moving a motion in favour of what was then called an ‘in-out referendum’ on the EU in the House of Commons in October 2011, Eurosceptic Conservative MP, David Nuttall noted that At a time when people pick up their phones and spend their own money voting week in, week out to keep their favourite contestants on programmes such as “Strictly Come Dancing” and “The X Factor”, many will be baffled as to why the Government and all those who oppose this motion seem keen to prevent them from having their chance to vote on Britain’s future relationship with the European Union. (Hansards vol. 534, part 1, col. 48)

The suggestion popular SMS voting systems for television contests—adopted for Eurovision as part of a mixed popular-jury system after 2003—might be more democratic than the EU did not translate into support for the EBU’s flagship event: as we have seen, calls for the UK’s withdrawal from Eurovision were made publically from 2009. Yet as Britain increasingly looked backward for its musical identity, Eurovision become more of the moment. Claims that Eurovision

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was musically behind the times were hard to sustain in the face of clear overlap between international chart hits and songs produced for Eurovision: a comparison of Moldova’s entry for 2017 ‘Hey Mama’ and Jonas Blue’s hit ‘Mama’ from the same year provides a case in point. Eurovision had also (in some cases quite belatedly) incorporated a variety of genres such as rap and heavy metal into its offerings, although pop still dominated. The familiarity of audiences with global music talent show franchises such as the Idol series, and the use of participants in these shows as talent for Eurovision (for example, all Australian Eurovision entrants competed in these shows), brought Eurovision into closer alignment with other aspects of popular culture. A corollary of this disengagement from Eurovision was the search for new (or renewed) political communities to help ease the transition from the EU to something and somewhere else. A notable feature of this debate was the return of the former Empire and Dominions to British political consciousness; a vision of international political community heavily inflected with past relationships, including the Atlanticism so central to Anglo-US pop music. At the outset of the Brexit referendum campaign David Davis argued that: This is an opportunity to renew our strong relationships with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. These parts of the world are growing faster than Europe. We share history, culture and language. We have family ties. We even share similar legal systems. The usual barriers to trade are largely absent… So it is time we unshackled ourselves and began to focus policy on trading with the wider world, rather than just within Europe. (Davis 2016)

This nostalgia all helped to sustain and energise political demands to create what we might call “a better yesterday” for the United Kingdom, a vision of the future sustained and legitimised by the past in which Europe played an increasingly marginal role. In this light, the 2015 UK entrant Electro Velvet’s other career as a Rolling Stones tribute band was significant. Not only was it an entertainment circuit echo of Britpop’s nostalgia and Oasis’ veneration of The Beatles in particular but it also suggested a better yesterday when British pop music ruled the airwaves and implied that Eurovision was beneath the status of British pop. This reorientation had a further echo at Eurovision in

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2015 when Australia was admitted to the competition. Yet as in politics, so in Eurovision: the UK’s high vote for Australia’s entry was not reciprocated by Australia, where the audience was more ‘European’ than British in its origins. Unfortunately for those of Terry Wogan’s view about bloc voting, Australia’s incorporation could not be seen as an emerging pro-UK bloc.

Conclusions What we might call ‘Eurovision-scepticism’ in the United Kingdom reveals something about the nature of English Euroscepticism itself. Euroscepticism is not just a political phenomenon denoting (in the United Kingdom) concern about the constitutional status of the UK within the EU or an antipathy towards the free movement of labour from newer member-states. It is in fact part of a wider attitude towards Europe embedded within the worldview imparted by powerful narratives contained within the frames of English nationhood. In these narratives, Europe is literally a continent for losers: losers of wars and losers who can never attain the greatness of Britain’s place as the ‘pop workshop of the world’. Certainly the UK’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest can be read as a metaphor for its engagement with the EU—without yet the dramatic denouement of Brexit. Early promise in Eurovision mirrored the desire to join the EEC in the 1960s and signalled the UK’s ‘European’ credentials. The UK’s final win in 1997 came just as New Labour appeared to be leading the UK back to a European vocation. But this direction appeared illusory as Atlanticist traditions and patterns reasserted themselves: the UK’s 1997 winning entry was sung by the US band Katrina and the Waves. Jemini’s nul points in 2003 coincided with the invasion of Iraq and signalled the beginning of a serious disengagement from Europe, culminating in the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the vote to leave the EU. But beyond this analogy, examining Euroscepticism in tandem with attitudes towards the Eurovision Song Contest reveals something of the persistent and embedded nature of Euroscepticism in England. In this reading, Euroscepticism is not solely a political phenomenon but a worldview embedded in dominant English narratives that seek to explain England’s status and its place in the world in contrast to ‘Europe’ in its political and cultural expressions.

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References Archival Sources Boase Massimi Pollitt Partnership (1975) ‘Summary of Qualitative Research Findings on Attitudes and Beliefs Towards the EEC’ Carried Out for the National Referendum Campaign’, British Library of Political and Economic Sciences, SHORE/10/45 [EEC, 1974–75]. Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). EUF645. European Movement (British Council) (1972) European Community Cup and European Community Plate. Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). EUF645. European Movement (British Council) (1974) Facts. Published Monthly by the European Movement. London: European Movement (British Council). Historical Archives of the European Union (HEAU). HW47. Helen Wallace Collection. ‘The Rt Hon Dr David Owen MP Speaking at a Meeting of the Bruges Group at 6 pm on Monday 3 December 1990’. Historical Archives of the European Union (HEAU). PAN/EU 000007. Minutes of meeting ‘Public Interest in European Union: A Meeting in the Commons to Consider Measures’, 17 February 1931. Mass-Observation Archive, Special Directive 1982, ‘EEC Membership, Report on Material’.

Secondary Sources Anderson, P (2009) The New Old World. London: Verso. Bennett, A and Stratton, J (2010) ‘Introduction’, in A Bennett and J Stratton (eds) Britpop and the English Music Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate. Black, J (1994) Convergence or Divergence? Britain and the Continent. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bragg, B (2002) ‘Take Down the Union Jack’ on England, Half English. New York and Nashville: BMG Music Publishing Ltd. Britain in Europe (1975) Referendum on the European Community (Common Market): Why You Should Vote Yes. London: HMSO. Brown, G (1971) In My Way: The Political Memoirs of Lord George-Brown. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Davis, D (2016) ‘Britain Would Be Better Off Out of the EU—And Here’s Why’, Conservative Home. http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/02/david-davis-britain-would-be-better-off-out-of-the-eu-andheres-why.html. Accessed 16 March 2016. Fricker, K (2013) ‘“It’s Just Not Funny Anymore”: Terry Wogan, Melancholy Britain, and the Eurovision Song Contest’, in K Fricker and M Gluhovic (eds) Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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George, S (1998) An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gifford, C (2014) The Making of Eurosceptic Britain, 2e. Farnham: Ashgate. Hannan, D (2014) ‘Stand by for a Eurosceptic Breakthrough’, Telegraph Blogs, 13 May 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20150909075255/http:// blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100271219/stand-by-for-the-delayed-eurosceptic-breakthrough/. Accessed 10 September 2015. Hansards Parliamentary Record, 28 October 1971, vol. 823, col. 2174. Henderson, A, Jeffery, C, Scully, R, Wincott, D, and Wyn Jones, R (2017) ‘How Brexit Was Made in England’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19 (4), 631–646. Hunt, T (2018) ‘No More Eurovision? Tory MP Causes CHAOS with Brexit Demand as MPs Erupt with Laughter’, Sunday Express, 11 May 2018. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/958540/Brexit-news-Eurovision2018-Michael-Fabricant-House-of-Commons. Accessed 9 September 2018. Huq, R (2010) ‘Labouring the Point? The Politics of Britpop in “New Britain”’, in A Bennett and J Stratton (eds) Britpop and the English Music Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate. Kaiser, W (2010) ‘From Isolation to Centrality: Contemporary History Meets European Studies’, in W Kaiser and A Varsori (eds) European Union History: Themes and Debates. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kenny, M (2014) The Politics of English Nationhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lequesne, C (2018) ‘Brexit and the Future of EU Theory’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Brexit. Abingdon: Routledge. Manners, I and Murray, P (2016) ‘The End of the Nobel Narrative? European Integration Narratives and the Nobel Peace Prize’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 54 (1), 185–202. Regev, M (2013) Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Roberts, A (2006) A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Roberts, L (2014) ‘Talkin’ Bout My Generation: Popular Music and the Culture of Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20 (3), 262–280. Spiering, M (2015) ‘The Essential Englishman: The Cultural Nature and Origins of British Euroscepticism’, in K Tournier-Sol and C Gifford (eds) The UK Challenge to Europeanization: The Persistence of British Euroscepticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Stratton, J (2010) ‘Englishing Popular Music in the 1960s’, in A Bennett and J Stratton (eds) Britpop and the English Music Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate.

72  B. WELLINGS ET AL. Stretton, P (2008) ‘98% Say Quit Eurovision’, The Express, 27 May 2008. http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/45760/98-say-quit-Eurovision. Accessed 10 September 2015. Taylor, P (2008) The End of European Integration: Anti-Europeanism Explained. Abingdon: Routledge. Telegraph, ‘Iraq War Blamed for Eurovision Failure’, 25 May 2003, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1431107/Iraq-war-blamed-for-Eurovisionfailure.html. Accessed 14 September 2017. Thatcher, M (1988) ‘Speech to the College of Europe’, 22 September 1988. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107332. Accessed 10 September 2018. Usherwood, S and Startin, N (2013) ‘Euroscepticism as a Persistent Phenomenon’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 53 (1), 1–6. Van Ingelgom, V (2014) Integrating Indifference: A Comparative, Qualitative and Quantitative Approach to the Legitimacy of European Integration. Colchester: ECPR Press. Wellings, B (2012) English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: Losing the Peace. Bern: Peter Lang. Wellings, B and Baxendale, H (2015) ‘Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere: Traditions and Dilemmas in Contemporary English Nationalism’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 53 (1), 123–139. Wellings, B and Power, B (2016) ‘Euro-Myth: Nationalism, War and the Legitimacy of the European Union’, National Identities, 18 (2), 157–177. Wells, M (2003) ‘Nul Points—UK Out of Tune with Europe’, Guardian, 26 May 2003, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/ may/26/bbc.arts. Accessed 14 September 2017. Wright, M (2017) ‘Eurovision 2017: Lucie Jones Wows Fans But Viewers Blame Brexit for Her Downfall’, Express, 13 May 2017, available at: http://www. express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/804272/Eurovision-2017-Lucie-Joneswows-fans-but-viewers-blame-Brexit-for-downfall. Accessed 14 September 2017. Wyn Jones, R, Lodge, G, Henderson, A, and Wincott, D (2012) The Dog That Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Wyn Jones, R, Lodge, G, Jeffery, C, Gottfried, G, Scully, R, and Henderson, A (2013) England and Its Two Unions: Anatomy of a Nation and Its Discontents. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. YouGov (2017) ‘First Came Brexit, Now Britain Wants to Leave the Eurovision Song Contest’, YouGov, 12 May 2017. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/ articles-reports/2017/05/12/first-came-brexit-now-britain-wants-leave-eurovisi. Accessed 13 December 2018.

CHAPTER 4

Which Belgium Won Eurovision? European Unity and Belgian Disunity Julie Kalman

1986 was a year of firsts for the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). The contest was hosted in Norway, for the first time. A record number of participants, twenty-two in total, took part. And Belgium broke the longest then existing drought in Eurovision history, winning its first— and so far, its only—contest after thirty years. The winning entry was ‘J’aime La Vie’ [I Love Life], a relentlessly upbeat song that would make perfect sense to anyone who happened to be a teenager in the 1980s. It was delivered with appropriate enthusiasm by thirteen year old Sandra Kim, from Liège, a town in French-speaking Wallonia. Kim burst onto the stage, dressed in skin-tight hot pink lycra and a natty white jacket. She scored a record number of points: every country’s jury, with the exception of the one representing the neighbour that had invaded little Belgium with each world war, awarded the song at least five points. At the news of the win, all of Belgium ‘exploded with joy’ (Sélys 2013, p. 92). The Belgian press was ecstatic, and it gave the win extensive, and extended coverage. ‘Finally,’ read the headline in Le Soir [Evening],

J. Kalman (*)  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_4

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‘Belgium Enchants Europe!’ But the girl of the hour was Sandra, characteristically described in Le Soir as ‘the little girl from Liège of Italian background’ (5 May 1986, p. 1)1 (Kim was born Sandra Caldarone to Italian immigrant parents) who had given Belgians a chance to indulge in national pride. Sandra, the Dernière heure [The Latest Hour] told readers in its front page headline, had been ‘Welcomed like a princess’. On her arrival home at Belgium’s Zaventem Airport, she was presented to the executive of the French language broadcaster, the RTBF, and to Philippe Monfils, senator for Sandra’s home city of Liège in the Walloon, or French language, parliament.2 But, as the newspaper noted, the most moving aspect of Sandra’s return to Belgium was the ‘welcome reserved by the Belgian public for its heroine of the day’ (La Dernière heure, 5 May 1986, p. 1).3 At the airport, in the arrivals hall and out the front, a large crowd of admirers, finding space where they could, held up banners reading ‘Sandra, you are our pride’, offered bouquets of flowers, or hands to be shaken. Sandra, too small to be seen easily, was seated on the roof of a waiting white Mercedes, and driven away in triumph. In just one day, she had become ‘a national glory’. Over the following days the reporting continued, with all of page eight dedicated to the win on the fifth, more front-page declarations on the sixth, and another half page on page nine of the newspaper. Eurovision 86, as La Dernière Heure proclaimed, was ‘Our Eurovision’! Indeed, this was a fully inclusive use of the first-person pronoun. All of Belgium feted Sandra. Bilingual Belgium also had a vibrant Dutch press,4 and Het Laatste Nieuws [The Latest News], the entire country’s best-selling newspaper, gave Sandra just as much, if not more, space than its French-language counterparts.5 ‘Finally Belgium’! read its front page headline on May 5. And ‘Finally for us, for Belgium, for Sandra’, concluded the excited column. But of course, according to Eurovision rules, the winning nation was the following year’s host. Here was where Belgium was to face difficulty: as planning began, divisions became apparent. Predictably, these followed Belgium’s traditional fault lines, running between its two main language communities. This chapter traces the story of Belgium’s breakdown over Eurovision in 1987. Belgium’s two main language communities had their own broadcasting companies: Radio Télévision belge francophone [Belgian Francophone radio television, RTBF], and Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep [Belgian Radio and Television Broadcasting, BRT].6 When the contest began in 1956, it had been agreed that were Belgium to win, the following year’s contest would be a co-production between the two broadcasters, which,

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at that time, were part of a single government body. But in the thirty years since the agreement had been made, the broadcasting industry in Belgium had undergone what Musso, Souêtre and Levasseur call ‘nothing short of a revolution’: the transfer to the two cultural communities of responsibility for the legal and technical control of the television industry, followed by the opening of the market to private interests and to advertising, and finally the alignment of Belgian legislation with European directives. (Musso et al. 1995, p. 138)

In the 1960s, with the move to federalise public broadcasting in Belgium, the RTB and BRT were established. The running of the two broadcasting bodies was devolved to their respective language communities. In the 1980s, in a move common to all of Europe, but which had particular political overtones in Belgium, the television industry was deregulated, and opened up to the private sector. By the time Belgium did, finally, win, the landscape had changed considerably. Changes in broadcasting were just one part of increasing federalisation, going hand in hand with increasing regionalism. In bi-lingual Belgium, media and cultural/linguistic identity were locked together. There was—and indeed, still is—no single media market in Belgium. Rather, language-specific media organs sheltered ‘behind language barriers to exploit the specific characteristics’ of each region (Musso et al. 1995, p. 119). Thus, the communication industry of each language region can be seen as an expression of its ‘claims to cultural autonomy’ (Musso et al. 1995, p. 120). All of this meant that the path of cooperation was not to be smooth. The federalisation of Belgium was in large part due to the politicisation of the language communities. This came to a head following the win, when a fracas ensued, which ultimately saw the BRT pull out of organizing the 1987 contest altogether. These two moments, of national elation following the win, and national division over its consequences, offer, in microcosm, the story of Belgium’s particular challenge: how do its two different language populations come together to maintain a national identity, and how is this balanced, in Belgium, with the country’s central place in Europe? On the Monday immediately after the contest, as Het Laatste Nieuws was giving full voice to Belgium’s delight at Sandra’s win, it was also, already, raising concerns about the requirement that the two

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broadcasting companies work together on the following year’s contest. This was going to be a ‘tough and expensive job’, and a ‘heavy responsibility’ for the BRT (Het Laatste Nieuws, 5 May 1986, p. 9). The paper returned to the same question over the next two days. For Het Laatste Nieuws, the relationship promised to be unhappy, from the very start. ‘Condemned’ was the word that the newspaper used, repeatedly, to describe the commitment to cooperation. Its page three article on May 6 was accompanied by an image of Sandra, seated, with her head back, laughing, and surrounded by smiling men who watched her. The picture was taken in a café in Sandra’s home town of Liège. But it spoke to the article in another way, too. Het Laatste Nieuws described the Walloon community claiming ownership of Sandra, and through her, the contest. It quoted two prominent Walloon politicians, Philippe Monfils and José Happart, gleefully anticipating the benefits Sandra’s win would bring to Wallonia, through exposure and tourism (Het Laatste Nieuws, 6 May 1986, p. 3). While Het Laatste Nieuws continued to claim that Sandra Kim was ‘from Belgium’, (Het Laatste Nieuws, 7–8 May 1986, p. 5) it nonetheless saw ‘political disorder’ in the situation surrounding the organization of the 1987 contest (Het Laatste Nieuws, 6 May 1986, p. 3). This apparent incompatibility (how could the Dutch-language newspaper continue to laud Sandra and call her Belgian, and yet be so sharply critical of its fellow, French-speaking Belgians, among whose number Sandra counted?), goes, in fact, to the heart of this chapter. All discourses around the contest, and those of the Flemish population in particular, could maintain a romantic ideal of the nation while feeling completely divorced from the state.7 The French-language newspapers also noted the diplomatic challenges ahead. On Tuesday, May 6, Le Soir reported that ‘claims’ and applications had begun arriving, from communities and venues around Belgium. First contact had already been made, it told the reader, between the RTBF and the BRT on the previous day. ‘Which,’ it went on, ‘judging by the avalanche of communiques, claims, and/or applications [to host the 1987 contest] that followed little Sandra’s win, will have a wealth of diplomacy to display to get a good TV program going for 1987’ (Le Soir, 6 May 1986, p. 1). Compared with its larger neighbours, the history of Belgium has not been the focus of a significant body of work. The little nation, the object of a ‘rather dismissive’ view according to one of its rare Englishlanguage scholars, is generally overlooked in histories of modern Europe

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(Conway 2012, p. 5). Or it is invoked as an example of failure, in the context of Flemish nationalism (Friend 2012). Yet Belgium sits at the heart of Europe, geographically, politically, and historically. Moreover, as a nation-state that encompasses three major language communities, its own, complex history can tell us much about the relationship between state and nation, and the limits of modern national identity in Europe. What has been written about Belgium, however, tends to focus inwards, on the nation’s own story, and backwards, looking for its current challenges in its past. The titles of books and articles on Belgian national history generally serve as a warning: this is not a happy story. Belgium is ‘Long United, Long Divided’ (Humes 2014); its history is one of ‘Conflict and Coexistence’ in a ‘Culturally Divided Society’ (Lijphart ed. 1981). This ‘Divided Belgium Walks a Tightrope’ (Buruma 2011, p. 36) surely too much to ask of any nation? In an article in the Journal of Belgian History, well-known figures on the Belgian academic landscape Chantal Kesteloot and Bruno de Wever, ask when their nation ended (2012). The story of Belgium has brought Dutch writer Ian Buruma to style it as a divorce, and Tony Judt to ask, rhetorically, whether there ever even was a Belgium (Judt 1999). This is what Martin Conway has termed the ‘pervasive sense of crisis’ that permeates the literature (2012, p. 5). All of these works tell a story, tinged by a highly pessimistic teleology, of a nation doomed to fail, the divide between northern, Flemishspeaking populations and southern French-speaking Walloons too great to overcome. Yet Belgium, apparently against all odds, has not failed. In this chapter, I consider how Belgium functions as a nation, and the role of Europe in its successes and failures. In general, works on Belgium pay scant attention to the country’s place in and relationship to Europe. But Belgium was at the forefront of Europe’s creation, and its capital city has come to signify the Union. As Ben Wellings has noted, elsewhere in this volume, Wolfram Kaiser identified a lacuna in the scholarship on European integration. This scholarship has, in Kaiser’s words, failed to consider ‘the Europeanization impact of integration on member states, their politics, and societies,’ and yet here, for Kaiser, is the link between the ‘national, regional, and local history’ of EU member nations, and EU history itself (2010, p. 49). What is the effect of their central role in Europe on Belgians themselves, and their sense of their own identity? Belgium’s sole win in the ESC, and the national response to this, make this link, between European Union and nation, highly visible.

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The Making of Belgium Belgium was established in the nineteenth century by a French-speaking, Catholic elite. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Catholic Southern Netherlands, as this territory was then known, had been merged with the kingdom of Holland. But in 1830, this elite, of Walloons and Flemish, both groups French-speaking, broke away from the largely Protestant Netherlands with the support of the Catholic Church. They organised for the German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, to become their monarch, as Leopold I. The Dutch, of course, protested, but at the congress of London in 1831 the Great Powers, namely Prussia, Russia and Austria, bowed—reluctantly—to Britain’s urging and brought Belgium into being. From the very beginning, according to two scholars, Belgium was ‘thought of as a “subsidiary government” which would play the role of arbiter, leader, and lawyer’ between the different groups, rather than ‘a centralized homogenising and directing force’ (Foret and Ferreira d’Antunes 2012, p. 171). Divisions between these different groups have run through Belgium throughout its history. In the nineteenth century, the Flemish movement sought to remake Belgium as a bilingual state, while the French-speaking Walloon movement, in response, created as its motto ‘one country, one language’ (Kesteloot 2013, p. 481). While neither movement wished to undermine Belgium’s integrity as a nation, their ideas on what form this nation should take were incompatible. In World War I, Germany invaded and occupied neutral Belgium. This gave rise to international sympathy, including setting off Britain’s involvement in the war, and created a strong national mobilisation. Chantal Kesteloot argues that Belgium’s experience in World War I became ‘the foundational myth of the Belgian state’ (2013, p. 482). This was a myth of great sacrifice, a myth that Belgium was not alone, of course, in finding in the events of the war to end all wars. But the occupying German forces had used the nascent Flemish-Walloon antagonism as ‘a strategic tool’ to divide the population. With the new surge in Belgian nationalism after the war, Kesteloot argues, a specifically Flemish nationalism emerged (2013, p. 482). The myth of sacrifice that became tied to Belgian, but also to Flemish nationalism was to play out in the next war, as history repeated. Once again, Belgium declared itself neutral, and once again, German forces invaded and occupied. Belgians, like many other Europeans, chose either to resist, or to collaborate with the

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occupying forces. The distinction between resistance and collaboration in World War II Belgium did not follow the division between Fleming and Walloon. Nonetheless, collaboration was more widespread in Flemish Belgium. In the immediate post-war, Walloon authorities convicted and disciplined almost 100,000 people. In Flemish Belgium, those Flemings who had collaborated with the German occupiers saw themselves as ‘victims of the Belgian judiciary apparatus’, a tool, of course, of the Walloons, who sought ‘to discredit the Flemish Movement’ (Kesteloot 2013, p. 483). These former collaborators were given legitimacy, and this allowed them to share their memoirs, and their perspective, and to become, in Kesteloot’s words, ‘the “memory makers”’ in Flemish Belgium (Kesteloot 2013, p. 484). Thus, the Flemish narrative of World War II took on a distinctly local hue: it became a particularly powerful chapter in the greater Flemish tale of subjugation of Flemish Belgians by the ruling Walloon elites. The narrative of victimhood was not challenged for four decades after the war’s end. Indeed, the notion was given new impetus with the reversal of economic fortunes in Belgium. In the post-war era, the oncewealthy mining towns of the French-speaking south went into decline as pits were closed, while the north, Flemish-speaking, enjoyed an economic boom. In 1980, a new State reform granted the regions greater responsibilities, as some controls were devolved to regional and language-based councils. This was a relatively limited reform, but its effect on Flemish politics was ‘enormous’. The administrative joining of region and language community introduced a new ‘dynamic’ politics in Flanders (Beyen and Destatte 2009, p. 196). This was largely focused on economic development. But it brought with it a new, cultural confidence, also. In Wallonia, on the other hand, the region found itself forced to seek a way out of an economic decline, ‘already several decades old’. The region’s coal, iron, and steel industries, based on a nineteenth-century model, were in ‘structural crisis’: businesses had grown too large, profits were weak, salaries very high, and there was very little investment in research. And while, in 1913, only nine countries in the world produced steel, by 1980, this number was 57 (Beyen and Destatte 2009, p. 209). Wallonia was no longer competitive. As the scales moved from one form of imbalance to another, regional sectarianism gained traction. The Flemish, once dominant in numbers only, began to make political demands to match their newfound dominance in wealth, initiating the move towards more localized rule. Belgium was fracturing.

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But if the events of World War Two had furnished the Flemish with a narrative of victimhood, and eventual ascent to dominance, they taught Belgians in general another lesson. The armies of the Third Reich had treated Belgium’s claims to neutrality in both wars with derision, and Belgians had come to believe that the only way to safeguard national independence—and ensure another war could not happen—was to establish a collective, peaceful system (Milward 1992).8 In fact, as early as 1912, the socialist leader Jules Destrée had seen a united states of Europe as the solution to what he believed to be a crisis of Belgian identity. ‘Noting that there were no Belgians, but rather, Walloons and Flemish, he saw their destiny, no longer at the heart of a unitary state, but rather of a European organisation. Thus, Europe contains Belgium’s political and identity fracturing’ (Foret and Ferreira d’Antunes 2012, p. 166). Even before the war’s end, in 1944, the Belgian government, then in exile in London, took the lead role in creating the Benelux treaty, a customs union that would later become an economic union, signed together with the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The three small countries reasoned that it could only be beneficial to them to act jointly (Bryssinck et al. 1990, p. 108). In the post-war period, Belgium, largely in the person of Paul-Henri Spaak, took this principle to a larger stage. Spaak, a socialist politician, was Belgian minister for foreign affairs for more than twenty years, between 1936 and 1966. In between, and at different times, he served as second secretary-general of NATO, presided over the first General Assembly of the United Nations in 1949, and was president of the General Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Small, vulnerable Belgium was instrumental in the creation of these organisations. ‘The idea that it is in the national interest to prevent any excessive power from the great States is so entrenched in Belgium that the construction of Europe has become one part of the collective identity’ (Foret and Ferreira d’Antunes 2012, p. 163). It was part of the group that founded the ECSC in 1951, and, by two treaties negotiated in Rome in 1957, the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and the European Economic Community (EEC).9 Belgium’s commitment to the great future that these organisations promised to shape was symbolised by the Atomium, opened at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The Atomium, shaped like the unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times, stands 102 metres tall, on the Heysel Plateau, north of Brussels. Three metre-wide tubes enclose stairs, escalators, and a lift, that lead to public spaces, contained in the

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eighteen metre diameter spheres, including a restaurant at the top, with panoramic views. But the story of how Belgium became the capital of Europe is a little more haphazard. On 1 January 1958, the newly agreed-upon institutions, the EEC and Euratom, were supposed to begin operating. However, the signatories to these institutions could not agree on where they should be hosted. At a crisis meeting in Paris, five days after the deadline, it was decided that for the first half of 1958, the Commission and the Council would be located in the capital of the country that held the presidency of the Council. This presidency being attributed in alphabetical order, the agreement amounted to a designation of Brussels. The Belgian foreign minister, Victor Larock, had in fact already made a case for Brussels: ‘capital of a small country, and thus having no ambition to dominate, located at the crossroads of Europe, equipped with a vast communication network via rail, road, and air, having available a considerable reserve of available buildings’ (Dumont 1999, p. 429). By early July 1958, the first six-month period had expired. But when the Council of Ministers for the European Community met in Brussels, the status quo was upheld (Dumont 1999, p. 429). As the European Community was implanting itself in Brussels, the city was engaging in a process that would come to be known as ‘Brusselisation’. The term has taken on international significance, and denotes the destruction of a city during peacetime. Notwithstanding Larock’s enthusiasm, the ‘considerable reserve of available buildings’ proved to be insufficient. The ‘colonisation’ of Brussels by European Union and Commission services lived in tension with Brussels’s role as capital of Belgium, and central locus of the administrative state.10 For Brussels, the term ‘Brusselisation’ describes the city’s uncontrolled development, following the introduction of a new urban regulation in 1962, and under the weight of ‘constant property pressure’ from the administrative services of the European Commission and Union. The goal of this planning law, according to one Belgian architect, was to ‘favour the property development sector’, since the private housing industry was granted the right, unique in Europe, of expropriation. This unleashed Brusselisation, and in Brussels, the ‘soulless’ approval of destruction of historic and emblematic buildings by the City was indiscriminate and careless (Culot, n.d., p. 57). Perhaps the most egregious example of this destruction was the demolition of La Maison du Peuple [The House of the People], a large,

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experimental public building designed by the celebrated Belgian Art Nouveau architect, Victor Horta, for the Belgian Workers’ Party. In the face of international protests, this historic and iconic building was destroyed in 1965. It was replaced by a twenty-six story office tower, in Culot’s marvellously outraged terms, of ‘distressing ugliness’ (Culot, n.d., p. 57). Belgium’s capital was re-making itself. For Tony Judt, this ‘disastrous “urban renewal”’ bears witness to ‘a combination of unrestrained private development and delinquent central authority’ (Judt 1999). But the Brusselisation of Brussels could also be testament to the weakness of the State, or disaffection from it, in the face of conflicting ideals of the nation. It is striking, and telling, that Belgium’s national library, the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, has undergone little modernisation, and remains largely locked in the same period as that of Brusselisation. National libraries are states’ monuments to themselves, buildings that serve to form one part of a wider national narrative, as Britain’s wonderfully practical and inclusive space, and France’s gloriously impractical but majestic monument both attest. But Brussels was increasingly making itself an anomaly, as the state reinforced the separation of the two main language communities in law. These were a series of changes that began in the 1960s, and continued through the 1980s. The creation of two separate broadcasting organisations was one part of this. Linguistic separation itself was also enshrined in law, as the state made successive rulings on education. A 1932 law had established the practice whereby schools would now teach only the regional language. It became possible to learn the other language—French, or Flemish—as a foreign language, and only after five years of education in the regional language. In Brussels, where the population was mixed, students of different mother tongues might share the same classroom and teacher. This situation was clarified by a 1963 law that allowed a school to separate out students according to their mother tongue, and establish separate language administrations. This was supported by a regime, also written into law, of ‘linguistic inspections’ (von Busekist 1998, p. 277). and followed by the establishment, in 1969, of two separate ministries of education. Schools were only allowed to employ teachers who had qualified in the teaching language of the particular school. Belgium’s particular version of the Europe-wide strikes and demonstrations of the late 1960s made clear just how separate the two language communities had become, as the local expression of post-war rebellion

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centred, unsurprisingly, on sectarianism. In Leuven, in the Flemishspeaking province of Flanders-Brabant, Flemish students at the city’s university protested the presence of French-speaking staff. With their slogan ‘Walloons Out!’ they drove francophone academics south into Frenchspeaking Brabant-Wallon, and a new university, Louvain-la-Neuve, was established there. These protests were part of wider Walloon and Flemish campaigns of protest, beginning in the 1960s. Martin Conway sees the common thread running through these protests as being ‘negative mobilisation against the state, more than the positive appeal of regional loyalties’. This was disgruntlement nourished in ‘a peculiar democratic political culture within which everybody felt themselves to be at best disadvantaged, and at worst persecuted’ (Conway 2012, p. 371). The pursuit of French-speaking academics by Flemish students in the protests destabilised social hierarchies in Belgium, and this in turn then destabilised politics. From the 1970s onwards, Belgian governments undertook a series of constitutional revisions. Historically, political culture in Belgium had been structured by three pillars: Catholic, Socialist, and Liberal. However, these could not withstand the new sectarianism, and they split along Flemish and Walloon-Brussels lines. Now, the representatives of divergent and often antagonistic regional and political traditions dominated the national parliament and, increasingly, the government itself (Conway 2012, p. 373). Each language area: Wallonia, Flanders, and Brussels, had its own separate government and prime minister, on top of the national parliament. Each language group now also had its own cultural council. As Astrid von Busekist points out, in the language regions, ‘there is no legal alternative to the language of that region’ (von Busekist 1998, p. 278). Brussels was further divided into nineteen municipal areas, each of which had its own mayor. In a process of uneven layering and overlapping, the capital also had six police zones. Judt, in fairly deprecating language, calls it ‘comically cumbersome’; ‘an uneven quilt of overlapping and duplicating authorities’ (Judt 2005, p. 711). For Martin Conway, Belgian federalism is ‘a many-headed hydra’ (Conway 2012, p. 2). But what is clear is that in the post-war, and from the first stage of constitutional revisions over 1970–1971 in particular, relations between the two main language groups were profoundly changed. Von Busekist sees this as evidence of both ‘political polarisation and communal-linguistic exploitation’ by political figures (von Busekist 1998, p. 278). However, as the response to Sandra’s win suggests, if Belgians were feeling an increasing sense of divorce from the state, this did not

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mean that they also felt divorced from any sense of the nation. In the mid-1980s, when the country won and then set out to host the ESC for 1987, it was in the midst of these processes of change. In 1984, the Belgian historian Pierre-Henri Laurent published an article on the state of affairs in Belgian politics, tellingly entitled ‘Divided Belgium Walks a Tightrope’. Two years before Eurovision glory, Laurent had Belgium facing ‘a triad of complex and interrelated conditions’: the devolution of regions, economic recovery, and the inability to find unity on defence policy (Laurent 1984, p. 169). In fact, in Wallonia, people could have been excused for thinking that ‘time was against them’ (Beyen and Destatte 2009, p. 236). Although significant efforts were made, beginning in the early 1970s, to turn Wallonia’s failing economy around, its effects were not seen until the mid-1980s. In just three years, between 1974 and 1977 the number of unemployed in the region had more than doubled, industrial production had negative growth between 1974 and 1979, and the period 1979 to 1985 was one of economic downturn. When Sandra won, in 1986, Wallonia did not yet know that its economy was in recovery; while in Europe the single market was initiated, and the EEC became the European Community, fortunes in Wallonia turned around, so that 1986 marked the first year of five, of growth. Sandra’s win in 1986 came in the midst of changes, both in Europe and in Belgium; some new, some simply difficult. These changes found expression in responses to her win, and most importantly, to the prospect of playing host. The win had allowed both Walloon and Flemish Belgians to indulge in ideals of the nation. But this proved to be a fleeting moment. The 1987 hosting of the contest in Brussels revealed the schisms that separated these ideals.

Belgium Hosts Eurovision The thirty-second ESC was held on May 9, 1987, on the Heysel Plateau, in view of the Atomium, at the Centenary Palace, one of the few remaining buildings from the World’s Fair that had been held in Brussels in 1935. Press coverage began in the week leading up to the contest. On the Thursday preceding, Le Soir provided a full-page article anticipating that the contest would be ‘the most important television program ever produced in Belgium’. The article reminded French-speaking readers of the ‘squabbles’ over the location of the following year’s contest, and how the BRT had pulled out, leaving the RTBF, alone, to ‘take up the

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challenge’. Flemish television had been ‘outraged’, as the article, put it, by the choice of Brussels as host city for the 1987 contest. It became the responsibility of the RTBF to help the viewer ‘get to know Belgium, and especially its French community’, as the organiser, Claude Laffineuse, baldly stated. Walloon confidence in itself had been quicker to recover than the economy. From 1979, according to Beyen and Destatte’s careful analysis, ‘political consensus around the construction of a Walloon leadership’ had been growing (Beyen and Destatte 2009, p. 258). The 1987 contest provided an opportunity for Walloons to showcase themselves. As sole organiser and broadcaster, the RTBF’s stated aim was to show the world a more nuanced and multi-faceted picture of Belgium that would ‘go beyond the never-ending linguistic conflicts between Flemish and Walloons’ (Le Soir, 7 May 1987, p. 21). For Le Soir, this was a bet that the organisers ultimately won. On the Monday following the contest, the journal’s headline read ‘Logan won, and so did the RTBF’! (11 May 1987, p. 1) (The contest had been won by the Australian-born Irish singer Johnny Logan). La Dernière Heure lavished equal praise. On the front page of its weekend edition, this newspaper covered the reception that preceded the contest, hosted by Belgium’s ‘delighted’ royal couple. King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola, the paper reported, had made a particular effort to speak with and congratulate Sandra Kim, ‘as, thanks to her, all of Europe has turned its eyes towards our country’ (La Dernière heure, 9–10 May 1987, p. 1). But what country was this? On the European stage, the year before, all of Belgium had felt Belgian. But what did that mean? A year later, Belgium felt Europe’s gaze, once again. The controversy surrounding the organisation and production of the 1987 contest suggests that any sense of a shared nationalism had been fleeting, at best. Het Laatste Nieuws began its coverage on the Monday preceding the contest: May 4. Yet while the paper gave the contest even greater space on its pages than in the Walloon community, it nonetheless referred to it in its small front-page column as a ‘song circus’, setting the tone for the reports to follow (4 May 1987, p. 1). While on the one hand, it covered the rehearsals assiduously, on the other, it revisited the entire bitter process by which the BRT, and thus the Flemish community, came to withdraw. All the grievance and resentment of the old narrative of victimhood was present in its coverage. On Tuesday, May 5, one headline read ‘How Eurovision was just a community farce’. In its choice of language, the paper told the story of the brevity of the moment of

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unity. Even before ‘our’ Sandra Kim landed back at Zaventem Airport, it stated, ‘the community merry-go-round’ had already started up (Het Laatste Nieuws, 5 May 1987, p. 4). The newspaper chose to retell the story of the split in detail, taking up an entire page. Just one day after the victory, applications to host the next year’s contest had been submitted by casinos on Belgium’s coast, as well as a multi-purpose hall in the Brussels commune of Forest, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in the Flemish port city of Antwerp. Yet, as the newspaper reminded its reader, Philippe Monfils, perhaps exaggeratedly described as ‘chairman of the French community and custodian of the RTBF’ had immediately stated that he wished the contest to be held in Wallonia. (Monfils was in fact the Senator for Liège at the time). A first meeting had taken place between the two broadcasting companies and the European Broadcasting Union, the producer of the contest, in late June. What Het Laatste Nieuws described as weeks of bickering between the not unbiased board of directors of the RTBF and the BRT followed. Het Laatste Nieuws reminded its readers that a ‘mixed’ technical committee had concluded that the building best suited to hosting the contest was in fact Antwerp’s large theatre, the Stadsschouwburg. This committee also ruled that the Coronmeuse, an ice-skating rink in Liège, and the Centenary Palace required too much renovation to make hosting the contest at either venue financially viable. Yet while the BRT ‘stubbornly adhered’ to the importance of the decision being ‘based on objective criteria,’ the RTBF insisted first on holding the contest in Liège, and when this was deemed to be impossible, it would not budge from Brussels. The BRT was ‘stitched up’, or so read the following headline. On October 6, the RTBF ‘suddenly’ announced that it wished the contest to be held at the Centenary Palace, on the Heysel Plateau. The BRT responded with what Het Laatste Nieuws called a ‘gesture of goodwill’, and suggested the Royal Circus, another venue. Along with this goodwill came an ultimatum: the RTBF was told that if it did not wish to take on the BRT’s suggestion, then it would have to organise the contest itself. The BRT enjoyed a temporary victory, when the directors of the Heysel officially withdrew. However, the RTBF quickly initiated secret negotiations, and an official announcement was made on October 16: the contest was to be held at the Palais du Centenaire. The BRT promptly withdrew from ‘the Eurovision circus’ (5 May 1987, p. 4). Martin Conway has written of the ‘political crisis’ that overtook Belgium by the 1960s, once it became evident ‘that Belgium no longer

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‘worked’ as a political community’. Large sections of the population, he states, became alienated from political systems (Conway 2012, p. 2). The overwhelming perception of Belgium, he writes, is of failure, ‘as a nation-state and as a political community’. This is certainly true of much of the literature, in which Belgium is the pin-up for the failed state. Yet as Conway argues, whether or not Belgium truly has failed is ‘entirely irrelevant’. State, and nation, do not necessarily, or not always go together in the case of Belgium. Sandra Kim’s 1986 win, and the bitter feuds that swirled around the organisation of the 1987 contest, tell us as much. In 1986, all Belgians delighted in their nation, and for a moment, when little Belgium triumphed on a European stage, this was a shared, inclusive understanding. But it is true, too, that this was almost immediately undermined, as quarrels began over where the following year’s contest should be hosted. When the same little Belgium turned in, towards itself, ideas of the nation once again competed.

Conclusion Bart Maddens, Roeland Beerten and Jaak Billiet, in sociology, political science, and data evaluation respectively at the same Leuven University that was the site of the 1968 protests, have argued, on the basis of what they describe as ‘an empirical investigation’, that there is no ‘single, self-evident national identity in Belgium’ (Maddens et al. 1990, p. 99). Arguably, of course, no nation enjoys the luxury of a single, uncontested national identity. Yet in Belgium, any contestation is complicated by resentments, tied to linguistic differences, that have facilitated the growth of a sense of national difference. For von Busekist, this is the growth of what she calls cultural, or federated nations. ‘Community representatives, members of political parties that have been split into linguistic and/or community branches mobilise their citizens around the question of their party’s interests’ (von Busekist 1998, p. 278). In the famous formulation of Benedict Anderson, Belgium has—at least—two ‘imagined communities’ (1983). Belgium’s extraordinary federal system has been no match for these fractures, and indeed, as the planning decisions of the 1960s suggest, not only do the people feel divorced from their bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy is equally divorced from the people. Belgium’s state apparatus, unsurprisingly, has no sense of its connection to the nation (Maddens et al. 1990, p. 99). For a moment, in 1986, all of Belgium was Belgian, and to be Belgian meant to ‘Love Life’,

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to embrace a young girl of Italian background from Wallonia, and to recognise, self-consciously, that Belgium was a nation in Europe.11 But what Belgium was this? In May 1986, Belgium was not just any nation, but a Eurovision winner, chosen by its fellow Europeans, in a cooperative environment that it had helped to forge. Eurovision provided a tangible, but ultimately brief, ‘anchor in reality’ for a collective Belgian identity (Beyen and Destatte 2009, p. 383). The idea of Europe, the moment of extreme visibility on the very European stage that is the ESC, was not enough to overcome separation, fed by resentment, and enshrined in law. Yet it is also, perhaps, this very separation that allows Belgium to continue to exist. In the win, and the ensuing debacle, Walloon and Flemish Belgians expressed their own Belgianness. Sandra won for them. When the two were forced to come together, the incompatibility of these ideals became clear. As long as the two populations remain safely separated, cushioned by a long history and body of law, and by the structures of Europe, then the incompatibility of their ideals can co-exist. Flemings and Walloons can safely imagine their Belgium, in the heart of Europe.

Notes





1. Le Soir is a daily French-language newspaper, published by the Rossel group—the leading daily press group. It was founded in 1887, and intended to be politically independent. It is one of the most popular French language newspapers in Belgium, reaching 65.2% of daily newspaper readers in the French-language area of Brabant (Brabant Wallon), and 51.7% in Brussels. All translations are the author’s own. 2. The RTBF is Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (Belgian Francophone Radio and Television). 3.  La Dernière Heure (DH) is published by the Société d’information et de productions multimédias. In 1986, this firm underwent a reshuffle and ownership was transferred to two families ‘known for their belief in Catholic traditions’ A public statement was issued at this time, to the effect that the DH would retain its identity and intellectual tendencies as ‘a popular newspaper that has always defended the ideas of the liberal Belgian family in Wallonia and Brussels, with no interference from any political party or pressure group’. Musso et al. (1995, p. 134). 4. Belgium’s population stands at a little over eleven million as at 2017. Within this population, there are almost twice as many Dutch speakers as French. Belgium also has a significantly smaller, but also officially recognised, population of German speakers in its regions abutting Germany.

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5. Het Laatste Nieuws is a populist Dutch-language newspaper. In terms of sales, it is the most popular newspaper in Flanders and Belgium. 6.  The BRT and RTB (Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep; RadioTélévision Belge) was a single, state-owned entity with separate language departments until 1977, when the entity split into two separate companies. The RTB added ‘Francophone’ to its name. The BRT is the fore-runner to today’s Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (Flemish Radio and Television Broadcasting Organisation), or VRT. 7. This manifested similarly, and much more recently, in Flemish commemorations of the First World War. See van Ypersele (2014). 8. Alan Milward has, of course, detailed the way the European Community ‘rescued’ the weak, post-war state. The closing of the coal mines in Belgium’s south is the book’s first case study. 9.  In 1967, these three organisations merged to become the European Community. 10.  The term ‘colonisation’ was used by René Schoonbroodt, a former president of the Workshop for Urban Research and Action (Atelier de recherche et d’action urbaines), L’Echo, 31 August 2001, cited in Beyen and Destatte, p. 375. 11. ‘After Belgium made a large contribution to the making of Europe, today it can be said that Europe is coming to the rescue of the Belgian state to fight against its internal fissures’. Foret and Ferreira d’Antunes, p. 168.

References Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Beyen, M and Destatte, P (2009) Nouvelle histoire de Belgique, 1970–2000: Un autre pays. Brussels: Le Cri. Bryssinck, R, Boudart, M, and Boudart, M (1990) Modern Belgium. Brussels: Modern Belgium Association. Buruma, I (2011) ‘Le Divorce’, The New Yorker, 86.43 (January 10), 36. Conway, M (2012) The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction, 1944–1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culot, M, dir. (n.d.) Bruxelles Architectures. De 1950 à aujourd’hui. Brussels: Editions AAM. de Sélys, E (2013) Vos années télé: la belle histoire de la télévision belge. Brussels: Racine. Dumont, G-H (1999) Histoire de Bruxelles: Biographie d’une capitale. Brussels: Le Cri. Foret, F and Ferreira d’Antunes, S (2012) ‘La Belgique et l’Union européenne’, in A. von Busekist (ed) Singulière Belgique, 163–172. Paris: Fayard.

90  J. KALMAN Friend, J (2012) Stateless Nations: Western European Regional Nationalisms and the Old Nations. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Het Laatste Nieuws. Humes, S (2014) Belgium: Long United, Long Divided. London: Hurst. Judt, T (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Heinemann. Judt, T (1999) ‘Is There a Belgium?’ The New York Review of Books, 2 December. Kaiser, W (2010) ‘From Isolation to Centrality: Contemporary History Meets European Studies’, in W Kaiser, and A Varsori (eds) European Union History: Themes and Debates. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kesteloot, C (2013) ‘The Past in Belgium: Different Memories and Controversial History in a Divided Society?’ European Review, 21 (4), 480–488. Kesteloot, C and de Wever, B (2012) ‘When Was the End of Belgium? Explanations from the Past’, Journal of Belgian History, 4, 218–234. La Dernière heure. Laurent, P-H (1984) ‘Divided Belgium Walks a Tightrope’, Current History, 83 (April), 169–172; 180–181. Lijphart, A (ed) (1981) Conflict and Coexistence in Belgium: The Dynamics of a Culturally Divided Society. Berkeley: University of California. Maddens, B, Beerten, R, and Billiet, J (1990) ‘The National Consciousness of the Flemings and the Walloons: An Empirical Investigation’, in K Deprez, and L Vos (eds) Nationalism in Belgium, Shifting Identities, 198–208. London: Macmillan. Milward, A (1992) The European Rescue of the Nation-State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Musso, P, Souêtre, P, and Levasseur, L (1995) The Printed Press and Television in the Regions of Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Le Soir. van Ypersele, L (2014) ‘The Great War in Belgian Memories: From Unanimity to Divergence’, in S Sumartojo and B Wellings (eds) Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Bern: Peter Lang. von Busekist, A (1998) La Belgique: Politique des langues et construction de l’Etat de 1780 à nos jours. Paris: Duculot.

CHAPTER 5

Negotiating Post-war Nationhood: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Eurovision Song Contest Nina Markovic Khaze

Introduction This chapter will explore the separate Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) trajectories of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), Croatia and Serbia following the break-up of Yugoslavia. It does so by presenting three case studies. These cases are BiH and Croatia as independent contestants since 1993, and the more complex case of Serbia, which was, firstly, performing as part of Serbia and Montenegro in 2004 and 2005, and then as Serbia from 2007 onwards. It shows how contestation over Western (European) and Eastern (national) traditions were played out and subverted by Balkan entrants negotiating and performing national and regional identities on a European and international stage. International politics and identity will be discussed through the examples of, firstly, socialist Yugoslavia’s final performance at the ESC and then individual experiences of BiH, Croatia and Serbia. BiH’s first representatives had to go through an extraordinary ordeal in order to reach N. Markovic Khaze (*)  Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_5

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a politically and socially distant place called Europe (symbolised through the ESC platform) and perform at Millstreet, Ireland in 1993. For them at that moment, Europe was a sphere of peace and possible salvation, unlike the homeland they only physically left behind in order to represent it to European television audiences via the ESC, pleading for international recognition. Whilst they could have used the ESC to seek refugee status in the EU, instead choosing to return to a place of uncertainty and civil war, Sarajevo’s band Fazla displayed human dignity and defiance that their song was describing so vividly on the 38th ESC stage. For newly independent post-Communist states generally, being accepted into the ESC contest was another example of, in Czech statesman Vaclav Havel’s famous expression, ‘returning to Europe’, apart from them signing political Europe Agreements which paved the way for their economic and political integration with another pan-European project, the EU. Akin to the case of BiH, the example of Croatia’s earliest participation at the ESC in 1993 was intertwined with regional and international political developments, with their debut song ‘Don’t Ever Cry’ which ended with the words ‘…my Croatian sky’ symbolising a call for an international recognition and its new identity projection. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (composed of Serbia and Montenegro) competed in 1992 but was banned from participation in the ESC until 2004 due to international sanctions (which extended to the cultural sphere) and isolation. Serbia took part in the ESC as an independent nation in 2007, having debuted in a surprise victory and bringing the contest to Yugoslavia’s former capital of Belgrade. These three case studies offer insights into how Europe is imagined and re-lived in Europe’s cultural and political periphery, where European identity is mixed with other socio-cultural influences from the Mediterranean, as well as Russia and Turkey. The ESC performances by artists from the Balkans are a reflection of this eclecticism, and offer an invaluable study of complex and multi-layered identity-projection by the Balkan nations on a European stage.

A Ritualised Contest and the Balkan Ethno Music Genre The following section will examine the importance of ritualisation for the ESC and discuss the place of the Balkan ethno music genre within the world’s most popular music event that has provided European and more distant audiences with a sense of predictability (that all major

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international media events create) and achievement of unity in diversity since 1956. The uniqueness of the Balkan region involves highlighting the particularity of the Balkan ethno genre, which transcends the EastWest divide and blends the symbols, traditions and lived experiences of the two under one umbrella. For some artists, a complete rejection of the Eastern element of that shared experience translates into being pro-European and anti-traditional, as the gap for them between these two socially constructed spaces, real and lived experiences may be too large to overcome (Rice 2015, p. 14). The ESC has several recognisable features, amongst which is the tune that has become Eurovision’s anthem Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’, which is also played at every official European Union ceremony. Eurovision’s theme symbolises pan-European identity, but it also reflects Europe’s Christian heritage. Written by a French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier around 1692, most likely in response to a French military triumph, it was a prelude to ‘Te Deum’ with elements of sacred instrumental music. Apart from the anthem, ESC as one of the world’s most prominent and successful annual media events has occurred every year since 1956; in the month of May and the finals are always on a Saturday night. This predictability or ‘ritualisation’ of European broadcasting, according to academic Gonzalo Torres, helps in the process of forging pan-European identity-building and identity articulation at three levels: national, sub-national and supra-national (Torres 2011, p. 250). When it comes to the Balkans, different nation-states that have emerged after Yugoslavia’s break-up and the end of Communism in that region more widely share some common group preferences and similarities as well as sub-regional differences, which are often political. Their performances at the ESC have all of these characteristics on display, through which different performers showcase their individual, group or regional identities and preferences for image-projection to wider audiences. In terms of musical style, the so-called Balkan ethno genre has some unique identifiable features, such as complex rhythm, with occasional inclusion of what Serbian-British musicologist Ivana Medic calls Oriental influences: ‘melismatic singing, the instruments such as the zurle, the hijaz tetrachord’ and others (Medic 2014, p. 111). Orientalism in this context refers to musical and other cultural influences from the Middle East, and/or the Ottoman historical legacy in culture of former vassal states. Displaying a pro-European identity in the Balkans (rather than pan-European, as this expression is not commonly used there) in a

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musical sense can mean minimising Orientalism in the musical scores and adding more Western instrumental and vocal influences, ranging from jazz to pop music. The opposite image projection is one of a more traditional and national, although not necessarily anti-European, image. The way an artist would dress for the ESC performance fulfils a similar mission of image projection, meaning that a more national costume or a blend of traditional and modern outfits represents eclecticism between the East and West. Wearing what is considered to be a purely Western style of modern dress or a more eccentric outfit would demonstrate moving away from the familiarity and historical roots of the nation to an unidentifiable pan-European sphere which is highly unpredictable and often considered to be anti-traditional and even anti-national (if a nation is conceptualised through a particular nationalistic framework that excludes alternative images of the nation). In analysing three case studies in this chapter, namely BiH, Croatia and Serbia after the Cold War, and their performances at the ESC up until 2018, Croatia has been least likely to deliberately resort to the Balkan ethno genre. Discourses over identity construction and self-image in the Balkans, contrast Croatia’s Habsburg heritage with Central and South Serbia’s and BiH’s Ottoman past in the discussions about these countries’ relationship with Western European traditions (Baker 2013). Musical pieces from BiH and Serbia, on the other hand, frequently include the Balkan ethno genre in their performances, or a blend of these with other musical styles. The intent is to demonstrate on a European stage what they consider to be the uniqueness of the Balkan region that combines Western and Eastern philosophical, historical, political, cultural and sociological traditions. In their edited volume on Balkan music, critical musicologists Ivana Medic and Katarina Tomasevic observed that: Theories such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Maria Todorova’s Balkanism have served as key methodological tools in conceptualizing Balkan music [through] … stereotypical and ideologically-charged images of ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ … [But] analyses of the Balkans solely with reference to ‘East’ and ‘West’ surely do not do justice to the diversity of relationships that have shaped its variegated musical space, and have inevitably rendered a distorted image of its musical landscape. (Medic and Tomasevic 2015, p. 7)

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Their book specifically highlights the interconnectedness of the Balkan music to other cultural influences, for example, to diverse music styles of the Mediterranean region. They also note that unlike very rigid, Soviet style of music that was imposed by the Soviet leadership in the Soviet Union and in many of its satellite states by local Communist regimes, Balkan music managed to escape such rigidity (Medic and Tomasevic 2015, pp. 7–8). In socialist Yugoslavia, which was politically situated between the East and the West in a non-aligned space (as one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement and host to its first official convention in Belgrade in 1961), traditional Balkan music was allowed to flourish and was showcased internationally. The domestic popularity of this style of music can be gauged by the fact that one of the biggest stars of Yugoslav musical scene, who held over 12,000 concerts of which 700 were abroad, were two accordion players from Serbia, Radojka and Tine Zivkovic. Their style of music was traditional folk music, and Radojka herself composed some of the most popular Balkan songs, still played across the region to this day. In 2015, Radojka was recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the longest ever performing accordion player in the world (Gucijan 2015). Yet when in 1961 socialist Yugoslavia debuted in the ESC in Cannes as a contestant (alongside first-time appearances of neutral Finland and General Franco’s Spain), the style of Serbian artist Ljiljana Petrovic’s chosen song ‘Neke Davne Zvezde’ [Some Ancient Stars] was more Western, in the French chanson style typical of the Contest at that time. Developing the idea of a blended socio-cultural space between East and West, ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice considers the shared symbols of living experience that blends Eastern and Western traditions in Europe. He uses the example of a child being taken to a European concert music event and afterwards enjoying sweets in a local shop where ‘local and foreign versions of Turkish-derived styles of music are playing on the radio’ (Rice 2015, p. 14). An individual artist may choose then to either celebrate these cultural blends by including both traditions in their musical style, or they may completely reject one of the two seemingly opposing poles of Eastern and Western traditions and show preference for only one. This oscillation between what Rice calls ‘celebration’ versus ‘nullification’ of symbols of the East or symbols of the West happens because the artist believes that the gap is too large to bridge, or that the blend is simply, undesirable (Rice 2015, p. 16). It strikes to the core of identity

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question for an individual contesting nation, adjudicating panel, the national broadcaster and artists themselves. The ESC performance personifies a nation that is taking part in the contest; therefore, the image that the country portrays is deeply symbolic to European audiences, and highly individualised to the nation itself and to its diaspora communities. Lastly, the more political anxieties and uncertainty with regard to the participating nation exist, the more powerful a symbolism it may bring to the ESC as an avenue of artistic, musical or political dialogue with wider Europe.

Yugoslavia and the Eurovision Song Contest, 1961–1991 The next section will examine, amongst other things, Yugoslavia’s triumph at the ESC in 1989. That victory and subsequent organisation of the ESC in Zagreb marked the end of a long era of socialist Yugoslavia’s participation. This 35th ESC contest in 1990 also signalled a major change for the years to come with the collapse of communism in Europe: Toto Cutugno’s winning song ‘Insieme 1992’ alluded to aspirations for European unity after the Cold War. Unlike the majority of Eastern European countries, which became satellite states of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia’s socialist model was not imposed from the outside when it was declared a socialist state on 29 November 1945. That country was born out of a grass-root revolution led by Yugoslav Communist revolutionary Josip Broz Tito’s partisans during the Second World War (Uvalic 2018). Its dramatic break-up with Stalin and the Soviet bloc, when it was expelled from the Communist Information Bureau in a prepared text of a resolution on 28 June 1948 by its member states, necessitated that it looked to other socio-cultural alternatives and allies (Begus 2017, p. 144; Iatrides 1968, p. 27). This departure from the Soviet camp provided an opportunity for the Yugoslav leadership to forge new links with the West and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members in several aspects of foreign and defence policy, as well as in the cultural and technological sphere. In 1948, Yugoslavia’s business cooperation began with the French company Compagnie Francaise Thompson—Houston (C.F.T.H.) for the purchase of transmission capability; this cooperation extended to Italian and German companies soon afterwards (Novinar 2013). In 1950, socialist Yugoslavia became one of the twenty-three founding members of the European Broadcasting Union, which allowed it by the end of

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the decade to participate in the ESC as Europe’s only socialist country ever to have done so during the Cold War. That same year, Yugoslavia ceased its membership in the Eastern European-dominated broadcasting union, called the International Broadcasting Organisation, which moved its headquarters from Brussels to Prague after many members deserted it. In 1951, Eurovision—a word coined by a British journalist George Campey—became the world’s first inter-national system for the exchange of television programs (EBU Dossiers 2004, p. 4). On 12 November 1952, the Yugoslav Radio-Diffusion was created, which later evolved into Yugoslav Radio-Television (RTS 2017b). Tito’s regime was keen to develop technical capabilities as soon as possible to be able to contribute to the Eurovision network and create domestic television content and later on, an active film industry too. In 1953, three years before the ESC’s first instalment, Yugoslavia signed the Balkan Pact with two NATO members, Greece and Turkey as a bulwark against the Soviet expansion into the Balkans (Stone 1994, p. 393). This allowed Yugoslavia to cooperate with NATO more closely without becoming a NATO member state. Military cooperation with non-Communist countries in the early 1950s allowed Yugoslavia to explore furthering political and cultural links with both Western and non-Western states. Although it is generally regarded that Tito’s foreign policy became a balancing act between the two superpowers, in the 1950s it was an exploration of various alternative models that was cautiously welcomed by the West as it meant moving further away from the Soviets. Its non-aligned direction was devised after the Bandung conference of mainly African and Asian countries in Indonesia in 1955. The Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 left a profound impact on the Yugoslav leadership, which gradually allowed for Western socio-cultural influences to enter their multi-ethnic state. In fact, two major currents were formed, the reformist, de-centralisation current with a critical mass in the Croatian republic, and the traditionalist current which favoured a strong, centralised state, with a core in Serbia (Mihaljevic 2015). Although a period of socialist realism in the arts certainly had its manifestations in post-war Yugoslavia until at least early 1950s, with the gradual opening to the West in a cultural sense Yugoslav artists started to imitate Western musical styles, especially in the rock, avant-garde and electro-acoustic musical styles (Vuletic 2008; Bulc 2012). Furthermore, the Italian music festival of San Remo, which was the primary inspiration

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for the ESC’s creation led by its progenitor, Sergio Pugliese of the Italian RAI television channel, was also an inspiration for Yugoslavia’s Opatija music festival (named after Croatian town of Opatija), which began in 1958. This was the same year in which the Yugoslav Radio-Television was established, enabling technical ability for Yugoslavia to join the ESC three years later (Neves 2017, p. 135). Yugoslavia’s national pre-selection contest was often fierce; at one point in 1973 and in 1974, 36 semi-finalists competed. The competition was also in essence regarded as a contest between national radio-televisions of the six republics and two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija. Entries from the Radio-Television Macedonia and two autonomous provinces never won the national pre-selection. In 1973, a young artist Zdravko Colic won the title to represent Yugoslavia at the next ESC with the song ‘Gori Vatra’ [Burning Fire]. He then went on to become one of the region’s most successful musical stars in part thanks to his representation of Yugoslavia at the ESC, and enjoys popularity to this day. In 1974, a political, anti-war song won the Yugoslav pre-selection called ‘Moja Generacija 1942’ [My Generation 1942]. Evoking similar anti-war sentiment and memory politics as Ukraine’s winning song of 2016 entitled ‘1944’, ‘Moja Generacija 1942’ described the dire experiences in which Yugoslav newborns lived under the experiences of war and foreign (German) occupation in 1942, when there was not enough food or basic necessities. This song by Korni group competed at the 19th ESC in Brighton, UK when Sweden won with another war-themed song in a very different register, ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’. Yugoslavia came 12th out of 17 entries. This song demonstrated that ESC was not free of political themes, just as much as the national pre-selection process in Yugoslavia was not free of political controversies and influence. Poor scores for Yugoslavia continued for the next three years (in 1975, it scored 17th out of 18 entries) were not received well domestically. As a consequence, Yugoslavia did not take part in the ESC between 1977 and 1980, as well as in 1985, as the date coincided with the anniversary of Tito’s death (RTS 2017a). These examples show that a highly individualised nature of the contest meant that politics and national acts often went hand it hand as they were a reflection of either domestic socio-political sentiment, or a commentary on political developments either at home or abroad. In 1989, the Croatian group Riva’s catchy pop song ‘Rock Me’ emerged triumphant at the 34th ESC in Lausanne, Switzerland. This was a sensational victory for Yugoslavia,

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which performed as the Contest’s last out of 21 entries on the night. It was its first win in over three decades and for most observers, constituted a surprise victory (BBC 2018). The British public was completely dismayed as Britain again came second in successive years, ironically, with the pop band Matchbox’s song title ‘Why Do I Always Get it Wrong’! In the meantime, Yugoslavia’s political situation was in disarray, almost a decade after the death of its Communist ‘father of the nation’, Tito. Slovenia and Croatia demanded multi-party elections and there was a huge rift between political leaders in those republics versus Slobodan Milosevic’s anti-reform attitude in Serbia. To demonstrate one dominant sentiment about the sensitive identity questions in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, a story from the New York Times reports that when Riva won, an Australian-Croatian family said that they were outraged because they felt that Riva was Croatian only and not Yugoslav (New York Times 2018). That said, Yugoslav diaspora communities were often considering themselves in ethnic terms, and much less frequently as Yugoslavs. For this reason, Australia’s national broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), had its radio content in multicultural languages broadcast in separate language programs for Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian even several decades before Yugoslavia’s disintegration. By May 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and a pro-democratic ‘wind of change’, as per the Scorpions’ famous power ballad, was sweeping all over Eastern Europe. Preparations for the ESC in Zagreb the following year (in 1990) were not without political divisions in gradually disintegrating Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s entry as the host nation for that year was performed by a Croatian artist Tajci and titled ‘Hajde Da Ludujemo’ [Let’s Go Crazy]. Interestingly, Germany’s entry embraced the theme of freedom with ‘Frei Zu Leben’ [Free to Live] having entered the competition with a duo of Yugoslav and German artist (probably for seeking local votes) (O’Connor 2007, p. 122). In 1991 in Rome, Yugoslavia participated one last time with a Communist star on its flag. On this occasion, it opened the ESC with a song by a Serbian singer Baby Doll (entitled ‘Brazil’), which came second-last after receiving, overall, only one point from Malta. Several months later the unified country ceased to exist as the wars of Yugoslav disintegration shocked the international community; the bloodiest conflict that post-war Europe had seen since the 1940s and that undermined the idea of Europe as a continent of peace.

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Post-Yugoslav States and the Eurovision Song Contest Since 1992 As a market-socialist country, the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia’s participation at the ESC was anomalous but was a product of its nonaligned status during the Cold War. When socialist Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 its successor states took up places in the EBU and at Eurovision: in BiH’s case in the most dramatic fashion. The ability of these new states to compete and perform at Eurovision required artists to negotiate and at times subvert national and European traditions in order to present new identities in a European and international forums. Bosnia-Herzegovina in the ESC The participation of BiH, Croatia and Serbia from 1993 onwards shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the new identities and political realities of those states. Since its original debut at the ESC as an independent state in 1993 and up until 2018, BiH took part as a contestant 19 times, finishing 18 times in the finals. Its success can be attributed to several factors: high-profile artists (especially Dino Merlin and Hari Mata Hari) with resounding success in the region and large following among Southeast European diaspora communities; and block voting among Balkan states (before the voting system was changed in 2016). Other voting blocs included Scandinavian region and countries of the former Soviet republics. BiH’s greatest success was in Athens in 2006 at the 51st ESC finals. Popular Balkan singer, Hari Mata Hari, performed a love song ‘Lejla’ in its original language and in an ethno style, without any content in English language, with ‘Lejla’ scoring the third place. ‘Lejla’ was composed by a Serbian artist from Belgrade, Zeljko Joksimovic, whose own song in the same style of music (Balkan ethno style) came second for Serbia and Montenegro only two years earlier (in 2004) in the ESC finals at the 49th ESC in Istanbul. This collaboration by artists from former enemy states and of different ethnic origins but with a common linguistic background shows the importance of the ESC for regional artists as a stage where not only national but also Balkan identity is being showcased to European audiences. A similar message was being sent to Europe by Serbia’s artist Milan Stankovic at the 2010 ESC in Oslo, whose song ‘Ovo Je Balkan’ [This Is Balkan] blended distinct Balkan musical styles and traditional trumpet melodies.

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When Stankovic won Serbia’s national final, his band was attired in national costumes from different parts of that region. However, when he performed in Oslo, the artists wore modern, European outfits, but in the colours of Serbia’s national flag (red, blue and white), showing how national, Balkan and regional identities were modified for a European context. BiH did not participate in the ESC in 1998 and 2000 as it did not qualify, or between 2013 and 2015, citing mainly financial constraints. However, during this latter period and as a manifestation of its multi-ethnic identity, BiH during these years competed in the Turkvision Song Contest, which was a three-year initiative from the Turkish government inspired by the ESC and aimed at Turkic speaking countries and regions, including, for example, the Xinjiang region in China. This contest coincided with Turkey’s departure from ESC, with its last appearance being in 2012 in Azerbaijan (Dogan News Agency 2013). BiH’s blend of Eastern and Western cultural influences were reflected in its musical styles at Eurovision. For example, this country’s ESC songs such as ‘Sva Bol Svijeta’ [All the Pain in This World] (1993), ‘Lejla’ (2004) and ‘Bistra Voda’ [Clear Water] (2009) contained distinct Balkan ethno-musical elements and were sang in a native language, while songs such as ‘Hano’ (2001) and ‘Putnici’ [Travellers] (1999) contained a mix of Bosnian and other languages (English and French in this case) and represented a more eclectic musical style. On the other hand, BiH’s country’s pro-European identity was expressed at the 2005 ESC in Ukraine through Feminnem’s song ‘Call Me’ that was sung completely in English language. It was performed by a three-member girl band dressed in what their country’s conservatives would consider as Western, provocative style. One of the three singers, Pamela Ramljak of Croatian ethnic origin, went on to represent Croatia at the 55th ESC edition in 2010 in Norway. This demonstrates the inter-connectivity of national and regional identities in the Balkans amongst the artistic and entertainment communities, and in particular BiH whose multiculturalism was expressed at the ESC through music on a regional and international stage. BiH qualified for the 1993 ESC at the pre-qualifying round in the town of Millstreet, Ireland. It was one of several countries that never competed before, others including Croatia and Slovenia from the Balkans, then Hungary, Estonia and Slovakia from the former Soviet bloc. The European Broadcasting Union in this round had chosen

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three participants out of former Communist countries, and all three former Yugoslav republics came through to compete alongside other ESC contestants. The artist representing BiH at the 38th ESC in Ireland, Muhamed Fazlagić Fazla, came out of besieged Sarajevo in the most unusual political and social circumstances. He was a volunteer soldier in Bosnian armed forces, which formed a musical group of soldiers to act as moral support for the wounded (Eurostory 2018). As his native city was being shelled from surrounding hills he and his band Fazla (in part composed of other wartime soldier-volunteers) walked over Mount Igman on foot, got into a windowless bus en route to Zagreb, were arrested and questioned by the Croatian army for 24 hours, before finally reaching the airport and catching their flight to Dublin (Klix 2014). It was probably the most dramatic arrival for any artist coming to Eurovision. For Fazla, performing at the ESC with a male lead singer, two female vocals, a drummer, and bass guitar players, also accompanied by live orchestra led by a stand-in Irish conductor Noel Kelehan as their own conductor could not find an escape route from Sarajevo under gun fire, their song was more than an ordinary performance for a pan-European musical trophy. It was a plea for international recognition for Europe’s newly founded state, a breakaway Yugoslav republic, which was engulfed both in shocking civil war and trans-border conflict with Serbia and Croatia. While his compatriots (including his own family) were starving in the besieged city, Fazla sang about ‘All The Pain In This World’, which was being felt in Sarajevo; and about the frozen tears and stoic heroism reflected in an individual triumph over evil by remaining in their home country and defying the pain. The song was co-authored by one of the most famous regional singers, Bosnian Dino Merlin (Edin Dervishalidovic), who himself represented BiH at the ESC in 1999 and 2011, reaching Eurovision’s top ten both times. Such an act was inescapably political, but such acts are not permitted at Eurovision. This tension was resolved by framing the flight from Sarajevo, and participation in Eurovision, within the peace narrative of European integration. In an interview in 2018 for Eurostory (the Dutch journal on the ESC), Fazla’s former lead singer remarked that their 1993 song for BiH at the ESC, which was lamenting about the separation from a loved one in the midst of war, was not intended to be political but that it had become political because of their country’s suffering. Muhamed recalled that the British Independent at that time published an

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article calling for Fazla’s victory at the ESC. He commented that they felt at the time that ‘Europe did not care’ enough about his country ‘then as it does not now’, when common institutions are being de-constructed as the three constituent nations cannot agree on most things politically. His message, however, is that music can overcome enmity between peoples, as the 2006 song for BiH represented a collaboration between Bosnian and Serbian artists (Index 2018). Croatia in the ESC The 1990s were a decade of four Irish triumphs at the ESC, when Ireland became a veteran host nation for the contest. Croatia has taken part twenty-three times in the ESC since its debut in 1993 at Millstreet, Ireland, when it was selected alongside BiH and Slovenia to compete alongside old contestants in the ESC. Their 1993 song was a plea for international recognition in the midst of civil war in Croatia and a conflict with Serbia. The biggest success for Croatia was shared by a fourth place in 1996 and 1999 by Maja Blagdan and Doris Dragovic respectively (Narodni 2018). Croatia is the only country to have hosted the Contest (as part of socialist Yugoslavia) but to not have taken part in it as an independent nation (Eurosong 2017). As part of socialist Yugoslavia, the Croatian republic was overwhelmingly represented in the ESC, 10 out of 27 times between 1961 and 1991. Keeping in mind that Yugoslavia had six constituent republics, Croatia’s musical talent was trumpeted at the national pre-selection through the Radio-Television Zagreb. The pre-selection contest was originally known as ‘Jugovizija’ [Yugovision], then Opatija Festival from 1973–1976 and, lastly, the Yugoslav Selection for the ESC. At the same venue that the national pre-selection for Yugoslavia’s ESC entry was taking place at Opatija, Croatia’s national pre-selection contest called ‘Dora’ takes place today. Social scientist Mauro Neves, who used content analysis for Croatia’s ESC songs between 1993 and 2013, found that for Croats, participating in the ESC was a way to become more integrated into Europe as a whole before the country even joined the EU in 2013. Citing financial reasons, Croatia did not participate in the ESC in 2014 and 2015, which was possibly also in part because of its weak performances in the seven previous years (Neves 2017, p. 146). The Croatian national broadcaster, for the first time, decided not to broadcast the ESC in 2015,

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as ‘Croatia did not have their representatives’ in this contest (HRT 2015). This was completely out of the norm for Croatia, especially since Croatia and Austria have traditionally close relationship as next-door neighbours with Austria strongly supporting Croatia’s European integration path. Interestingly, Croatia’s 2016 ESC entry ‘Lighthouse’ was written by Austrian production team called Popmaché, which made it into the finals for Croatia for the first time since 2009. Performance by groups of one ethnic origin performing in another ex-Yugoslav country where their ethnicity is predominant, demonstrates the fluidity in regional identities and representation. For example, in 2010, a group of singers from BiH (which represented BiH at the ESC in 2005 in Ukraine) sang for Croatia in 2010. Furthermore, Croatia’s ESC entries were often performed by experienced and popular singers with large appeal in the region and amongst diaspora communities beyond (for example, Doris Dragovic, Goran Karan, Boris Novkovic, Severina, Nina Badric) (see Table 5.1). However, from 2017, suggestions surfaced as to whether Croatia should give up on the ESC altogether because of its lack of success in the more gruelling qualification process via the semi-finals (Tportal 2018). This reflected a similar ‘Eurovision-scepticism’ in the United Kingdom and mirrored the Turkish decision to withdrawal from the Contest altogether in 2012. Unlike BiH, Croatia does not have a rival identity project such as Turkvision in which to participate. Thus it remains a small player in the wider European context. Serbia in the ESC Serbia and Montenegro as a collective state re-joined the European Broadcasting Union in 2001 a year after the fall of the Milosevic regime; a year that also marked the beginning of the European Union’s assistance to this country after a decade of sanctions, a series of wars and isolation. It participated in the ESC in 2004 and 2005, coming second at the 49th ESC in Istanbul after Ruslana’s victory for Ukraine. It was absent from the ESC’s stage in 2006 as the country underwent a ‘velvet divorce’ following an independence referendum in Montenegro, which was won by 0.5% of vote, that demonstrated the deep social and political divisions in that country over the separation. Serbia joined the EBU in 2006, which presented it with an opportunity to compete in the ESC the following year. From 2007, Serbia took

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Table 5.1  ESC Entrants 1993–2018 (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia) Year

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Croatia

Serbia (Serbia and Montenegro in 2004–2005)

1993 (Ireland)

Fazla, ‘Sva Bol Svijeta’ Alma and Dejan, ‘Ostani Kraj Mene’ Davorin Popovic, ‘21. Vijek’ Amila Glamocak, ‘Za Nasu Ljubav’ Alma Cardzic, ‘Goodbye’ –

Put, ‘Don’t Ever Cry’ Tony Cetinski, ‘Nek’ Ti Bude Ljubav Sva’ Magazin and Lidija, ‘Nostalgija’ Maja Blagdan, ‘Sveta Ljubav’ E.N.I., ‘Probudi Me’

–

Danijela, ‘Nek Mi Ne Svane’ Dino and Beatrice, Doris Dragovic, ‘Putnici’ Marija Magdalena – Goran Karan, Kad Zaspu Andjeli Nino Prses, ‘Hano’ Vanna, ‘Strings of My Heart’ Maja Tatic, ‘Na Vesna Pisarovic, Jastuku Za Dvoje’ ‘Everything I Want’ Mija Martina, ‘Ne Claudia Beni, ‘Vise Brini’ Nisam Tvoja’ Deen, ‘In the Disco’ Ivan Mikulic, ‘You Are the Only One’ Feminnem, ‘Call Me’ Boris Novkovic, ‘Vukovi Umiru Sami’ Hari Mata Hari, Severina, ‘Moja ‘Lejla’ Stikla’ Marija Sestic, ‘Rijeka Dragonfly, ‘Vjerujem Bez Imena’ U Ljubav’ Laka, ‘Pokusaj’ Kraljevi Ulice, ‘Romanca’ Regina, ‘Bistra Voda’ Igor Cukrov, ‘Lijepa Tena’ Vukasin Brajic, Feminnem, ‘Lako ‘Thunder and Je Sve’ Lighting’ Dino Merlin, ‘Love Daria, ‘Celebrate’ in Rewind’

–

1994 (Ireland) 1995 (Ireland) 1996 (Norway) 1997 (Ireland) 1998 (UK) 1999 (Israel) 2000 (Sweden) 2001 (Denmark) 2002 (Estonia) 2003 (Latvia) 2004 (Turkey) 2005 (Ukraine) 2006 (Greece) 2007 (Finland) 2008 (Serbia) 2009 (Russia) 2010 (Norway)

2011 (Germany)

– – – –

– – – – – Zeljko Joksimovic, ‘Lane Moje’ No Name, ‘Zauvijek Moja’ – Marija Serifovic, ‘Molitva’ Jelena Tomasevic, ‘Oro’ Marko Kon and Milaan, ‘Cipela’ Milan Stankovic, ‘Ovo Je Balkan’ Nina, ‘Caroban’ (continued)

106  N. MARKOVIC KHAZE Table 5.1  (continued) Year

Bosnia-Herzegovina

2012 (Azerbaijan)

Maya Sar, ‘Korake Ti Nina Badric, ‘Nebo’ Znam’ – Klapa s mora, ‘Mizerja’ – – – –

2013 (Sweden) 2014 (Denmark) 2015 (Austria) 2016 (Sweden) 2017 (Ukraine)

Dalal and Deen, ‘Ljubav Je’ –

2018 (Portugal)

–

Croatia

Nina Kraljic, ‘Lighthouse’ Jacques Houdek, ‘My Friend’ Franka, ‘Crazy’

Serbia (Serbia and Montenegro in 2004–2005) Zeljko Joksimovic, ‘Nije Ljubav Stvar’ Moje 3, ‘Ljubav Je Svuda’ – Bojana Stamenov, ‘Beauty Never Lies’ Sanja Vucic, ‘Goodbye (Shelter)’ Tijana Bogicevic, ‘In Too Deep’ Sanja Ilic and Balkanika, ‘Nova Deca’

part in the contest as an independent nation, debuting and winning that same year with Marija Serifovic’s song ‘Molitva’ [Prayer]. The artist is a member of the LGBT community in Serbia, which suffered decades-long discrimination; her victory paved a new era in her individual and group struggle for equality of gender rights that the image of ESC nurtures and has come to represent since the late 1990s. Apart from Serifovic’s success for Serbia at ESC, Zeljko Joksimovic came close to the trophy, scoring 2nd place in the 2004 finals in Turkey, and 3rd place in the 2012 finals in Azerbaijan. Some of Serbia’s ESC entries evoke memories of medieval Serbia (2008, 2012, 2018), as distinct from both Oriental and modern European Serbia. Serbia’s 2016 ESC entry by Sandra Vucic entitled Goodbye (Shelter) was a reflection of domestic politics and heated debates around the theme of domestic violence. The song sought to assert female empowerment in the face of danger from and fear of a violent partner. Vucic said that the ESC provides the best platform to talk about the struggle for gender equality in the face of a huge international and local challenge, such as the issue of domestic violence (Jovicic 2016). While Vucic did not go on to win the ESC (which is not necessarily the aim of all entrants), her powerful theatrical performance showed the intersection

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between ‘glocal’ issues: those of global importance with a clear manifestation at the local level. With this song, Vucic negotiated Serbia’s theme at the ESC as European, Balkan and global in terms of identity questions and topics of international relevance. As with BiH and Croatia, Serbia’s continued participation in the ESC was far from guaranteed at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Hosting Eurovision is expensive, especially for countries that, like Serbia, have limited resources, rely heavily on the European Union’s financial support and that have economy that is still in unfinished transition from state socialism to capitalism. However, their national image of being pro-European is also important as well as to show at ESC their uniquely ‘Balkan’ character in terms of music genre and eclecticism that the Balkan ethno music offers.

Conclusion These three case studies offer insights into how Europe is imagined and re-lived in Europe’s cultural and political periphery, where European identity is mixed with other socio-cultural influences from the Mediterranean and Middle East. Yugoslavia’s participation in ESC from 1961 as the only communist state was anomalous due to its non-aligned status during the Cold War. After the collapse of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, ESC entries for the successor states sought to negotiate Western (or European) traditions with Eastern or ‘national’ influences. Croatia’s Habsburg past gave it automatic ‘European’ credentials. BiH’s Ottoman and Habsburg traditions connected it to both Europe and Turkey. Serbia’s isolation from 1992–2004 spoke to national and nationalist traditions. These national traditions shouldn’t be overstated, however. Marija Serifovic’s surprise win in 2007 (as Serbia debuted that year) complicated these national traditions by aligning a Serbian entrant with a trans-national LGBT community for which the ESC was becoming an important platform for identity claims in the international arena. The ESC performances by artists from the Balkans reflected eclecticism and offered an invaluable study of complex and multi-layered identity-projection by Balkan nations on a European stage.

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svet-poznatih/sanja-vucic-spremna-za-evroviziju-sa-glasnom-porukom-protivnasilja-nad-zenama/. Accessed 5 November 2018. Klix (2014) ‘20 godina od pjesme ‘Sva bol svijeta je noćas u Bosni’: BiH će nadživjeti sve svoje grobare’ 4 January. https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/20godina-od-pjesme-sva-bol-svijeta-je-nocas-u-bosni-bih-ce-nadzivjeti-sve-svojegrobare/140104007. Accessed 1 May 2019. Medic, I (2014) ‘Arhai’s Balkan Folktronica: Serbian Ethno Music Reimagined for British Market’, Musicology, 16, 105–127. Medic, I, and Tomasevic, K (eds) (2015) Beyond the East-West Divide: Balkan Music and Its Poles of Attraction. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA. Mihaljevic, J (2015) ‘Liberalizacija i razvoj medija u komunistickoj Hrvatskoj 1960ih i pocetkom 1970ih’, Društvena istraživanja, 24 (2), 239–258. Narodni (2018) ‘Eurosong: najbolji rezultati Hrvatske’, 5 April. http://narodni. hr/index.php/2018/04/05/eurosong-najbolji-rezultati-hrvatske-doris-dragovic-i-maja-blagdan-bile-su-cetvrte-danijela-peta/. Accessed 4 November 2018. Neves, M (2017) ‘Croatia in the Eurovision Song Contest: From an Anti-War Message to the Recognition of a Cultural Tradition’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 48 (1), 133–147. New York Times (2018) ‘Meet the 4 Superfans Who Go Crazy for Eurovision’, 7 May. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/arts/music/eurovision-fans. html. Accessed 4 November 2018. Novinar (2013) ‘Kako je osnovana Televizija Radio Zagreb. Intervju Zlatko Sinobad’, 23 April. http://zg-magazin.com.hr/kako-je-osnovana-televizijaradio-zagreb/. Accessed 4 November 2018. O’Connor, J K (2007) The Eurovision Song Contest: The Official History. London: Carlton Books. Radio-Television Serbia (RTS) (2017a) ‘Our Country at the Eurovision Song Contest’, 1 February. http://www.rts.rs/page/rts/sr/Eвpocoнг/ Пecмa+Eвpoвизиje+2017/story/2650/english/2614435/our-country-atthe-eurovision-song-contest.html. Accessed 4 November 2018. RTS (2017b) ‘Trezor: Jugoslovenska Radio Televizija’, 20 November. http:// www.rts.rs/page/tv/sr/story/21/rts-2/2952709/trezor-jugoslovenska-radio-televizija.html. Accessed 4 November 2018. Rice, T (2015) ‘Musical Practice and the Experiential Power of Place’, in I Medic and K Tomašević (eds) Beyond the East-West Divide: Balkan Music and Its Poles of Attraction, 11–26. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA. Stone, D (1994) ‘The Balkan Pact and American Policy, 1950–1955’, East European Quarterly, 28 (3), 393–407. Torres, G (2011) ‘Pan-European, National, Regional and Minority Identities in the Eurovision Song Contest’, in M Sükösd and K Jakubowicz (eds) Media, Nationalism and European Identities, 247–268. Budapest: Central European University Press.

110  N. MARKOVIC KHAZE Tportal (2018) ‘Neuspjeh za neuspjehom: Je li vrijeme da Hrvatska odustane od Eurosonga?’ 9 May. https://www.tportal.hr/showtime/clanak/neuspjeh-za-neuspjehom-je-li-vrijeme-da-hrvatska-odustane-od-eurosonga-foto20180509. Accessed 4 November 2018. Uvalic, M (2018) ‘The Rise and Fall of Market Socialism in Yugoslavia’, 27 March. https://doc-research.org/2018/03/rise-fall-market-socialism-yugoslavia/. Accessed 4 November 2018. Vuletic, D (2007) ‘The Socialist Star: Yugoslavia, Cold War Politics and the Eurovision Song Contest’, in I Raykoff and R D Tobin (eds) A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, 83–97. Abingdon: Ashgate. Vuletic, D (2008) ‘Generation Number One: Politics and Popular Music in Yugoslavia in the 1950s’, Nationalities Papers, 36 (5), 861–879.

CHAPTER 6

Recognising Kosovo in the World of Televised International Song Contests Dean Vuletic

‘Nothing is more important than the Song Contest in nation-building’ (EBU 2012), stated Kosovo’s deputy foreign minister, Petrit Selimi, at a meeting at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in 2012. Selimi was then seeking to have his state, represented by its national broadcasting organisation, Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK), admitted into the ESC. His exaggeration was part of a charm offensive directed at the EBU, which published his quotation in a report on the meeting that was released on the organisation’s website. In a list of factors that are important for nation building, the ESC would hardly appear highly after matters of the economy, education, language, military and the media. A better term in relation to the ESC would be ‘nation branding’ rather than ‘nation building’, although it would still be difficult to isolate the Contest as the most important tool in nation branding even in terms of international mega events, considering the significance of the FIFA World Cup or the Olympic Games, for example. Nonetheless, Selimi’s adulation for the ESC underlined how important

D. Vuletic (*)  University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_6

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the Kosovan government has considered the Contest to be for its cultural diplomacy, as the government has, since Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, sought to enter various international organisations and increase the number of states that recognise Kosovo’s statehood—which by the end of 2018 stood at just over one hundred of the 193 members states of the United Nations (UN) (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kosovo 2018) and 37 of the 56 states represented in the EBU (Smith 2018). Yet, because of the EBU’s rules regarding the international recognition of the states that its member broadcasting organisations come from, RTK has by 2019 not been able to enter the EBU and Kosovo has consequently not participated in the ESC. Kosovo can, however, claim one ESC record: since 2017, it has had a minister of foreign affairs, Behgjet Pacolli, who is the only such minister of a European state who has been married to an artist who has performed in the ESC, namely the Italian singer Anna Oxa, who is of Albanian origin and represented Italy in the 1989 ESC. Kosovo’s desire to enter the ESC should not, however, be only considered in terms of these recent attempts to advance the international recognition of its statehood. Indeed, Kosovo was a member of the EBU from the organisation’s creation in 1950 when it was a province of Yugoslavia; it de jure only ceased to be a member of the EBU in 2008 after it declared its independence from Serbia. However, the cultural and political marginalisation in Yugoslavia of Kosovo’s Albanianmajority population and the Albanian language meant that an entry from Kosovo never represented Yugoslavia in the ESC, nor in the Intervision Song Contest (ISC) that was the Eastern European equivalent of the ESC during the Cold War and which Yugoslavia also participated in. The only televised international song contest that Kosovo has been permitted to participate in has been the Turkvision Song Contest (TSC), which was established by Turkish organisations in 2013 and reflects the neo-Ottomanist foreign policy of the government of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The case of Kosovo demonstrates that, despite the values of apoliticism, cooperation and diversity that the ESC has promoted, there is a tension between these stated values and the actual politics that determines the EBU’s membership. The organisation’s membership criteria are not based on Europeanist standards—the EBU has always been independent of other European organisations and has had no power by itself to recognise states—but on the principle of a state’s belonging to the United Nations (UN) and one of its agencies,

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the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The journalist Tim Judah writes that ‘Kosovo and the Western Balkans are being surrounded and fenced in by all the institutions of modern Europe and what is called Euro-Atlantic integration’ (Judah 2008, p. xv). Indeed, because of their relatively slower inclusion into other European organisations compared to other Central and East European states, the ESC has arguably played a more powerful role in portraying a Europeanist image of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia than it did for those Central and East European states which earlier entered the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). However, unlike the other successor states of Yugoslavia, the Republic of Kosovo has not yet been represented in the EBU nor on the ESC stage, and ironically despite the adoption of various Europeanist elements into Kosovo’s state symbolism. The EBU’s admittance of RTK could redress the historical marginalisation of Kosovo in European affairs and underline the values that the ESC seeks to promote, especially because Kosovo’s population has one of the highest proportions of Muslims of any European state and one of the highest rates of emigration, while Kosovo also ranks as one of Europe’s poorest states.

The Yugoslav Era As the historian Noel Malcolm traces in his seminal English-language history of Kosovo, Kosovo: A Short History (Malcolm 1998), during the Middle Ages the territory of Kosovo was at different times a part of the Bulgarian Empire, the Byzantine Empire and Serbian states. Kosovo was not immediately incorporated into the Ottoman Empire after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 in which Serbian forces were defeated by Ottoman ones, although the battle remains a key event in the mythology of Serbian nationalism due to the location of significant Serbian cultural and religious sites in Kosovo. It was by the middle of the fifteenth century that Kosovo, as well as the rest of the Serbian Despotate, was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Although an independent Serbian state emerged from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, Kosovo remained a part of the empire until 1913, following the First Balkan War between Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia on the one side and the Ottoman Empire on the other. It was then that Kosovo again became a part of Serbia—and subsequently of Yugoslavia when Serbia participated in the formation of that state in 1918. During the interwar era,

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the Yugoslav government sought to increase the number of Serbs in Kosovo and the region itself did not exist as a political-territorial unit but was rather divided among other provinces, as the government amended administrative boundaries across Yugoslavia that had been based on ethnic divisions or pre-1918 borders. However, with the re-establishment of Yugoslavia after the Second World War as a communist party-led federation, following the wartime victory of the local Partisans, Kosovo was established as an autonomous region of Serbia in 1946 and then as an autonomous province of Serbia in 1963. While Kosovo became self-governing in 1974 because of its Albanian-majority population—which at that time numbered around three-quarters of the province’s population—it always de jure remained a part of Serbia and never achieved the status of a republic that Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia had in post-war Yugoslavia. Although Yugoslavia was led by a communist party during the Cold War, it was unique in being the only such state to be represented in the EBU during that period. Like most other European states, Yugoslavia had been a member of the International Broadcasting Union (IBU), the inter-war organisation for national broadcasting organisations in Europe. The IBU adopted a geographical limit for its membership that covered Europe and the Mediterranean rim, and this region is today known as the ‘European Broadcasting Area’ and continues to define the EBU’s membership. The EBA was initially defined by the ITU in 1932 as being bounded to ‘the North and West by the natural limits of Europe, on the East by the meridian 40° East of Greenwich and on the South by the parallel of 30° North so as to include the Western part of the U.S.S.R. and the territories bordering the Mediterranean, with the exception of the parts of Arabia and Hedjaz included in this sector’ (International Radiotelegraph Conference 1933, p. 12). However, with the advent of the Cold War, political tensions made cooperation between Eastern and Western European states in a joint international broadcasting organisation unfeasible. Western European national broadcasting organisations consequently established the EBU in 1950, while the equivalent Eastern European organisation was the International Broadcasting Organisation, which was later renamed the International Organisation for Radio and Television (OIRT) (Eugster 1983, pp. 39–46). In 1948, Yugoslavia’s alliance with other communist-led states was severed after its leader Josip Broz Tito refused to submit to Soviet domination. Yugoslavia was consequently diplomatically isolated by Eastern European states and

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organisations and it thereafter became the communist-led European state that was most open to cooperation with the West, developing a nonaligned foreign policy that kept it independent of either bloc throughout the Cold War. One practical result of its defection from the Eastern Bloc was that Yugoslavia joined the EBU in 1950 as one of the twenty founding members, which meant that Kosovo, as a part of Yugoslavia, was included in the EBU from the organisation’s beginning. Indeed, Kosovo was a part of the EBU even before Austria, Spain and West Germany, whose memberships were stalled because of their Axis affiliations in the Second World War, as well as before some Western European states that joined the EBU later during the Cold War era and the Central and East European states that entered the EBU after the dissolution of the OIRT in 1993. In its early years, the EBU was relatively flexible with its membership rules as UN membership was not yet so widespread among European states, meaning that membership of the ITU—whose creation preceded that of the UN, but which became a UN agency in 1948— was the major criterion. This even meant that entities that were not yet states, namely Morocco and Tunisia which were under French and Spanish protectorate, were admitted into the EBU at the organisation’s founding (Vuletic 2018, pp. 25–26). With the development of television services in Yugoslavia from the late 1950s, Yugoslav Radio and Television (JRT), which represented Yugoslavia in the EBU, fulfilled the technical requirements to be able to participate in the ESC. Yugoslavia debuted in the Contest in 1961. Yet, as was the case with other cultural, economic and political affairs in Yugoslavia, Kosovo was marginalised in Yugoslavia’s participation in the ESC due to the province’s economic backwardness, geopolitical periphery and linguistic exceptionalism. As Malcolm notes, although the Tito era did bring Kosovo ‘a form of autonomy’, it also left a ‘legacy of a stultified political system and a collapsing economy’ (Malcolm 1998, p. 314). JRT reflected Yugoslavia’s federalism as it was a network of stations based in and named after the capitals of the state’s six republics and the two provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. While television services in Yugoslavia commenced in Croatia in 1956, it was only in 1975 that the first television station was established in the Kosovan capital, Pristina, after Kosovo had achieved self-government through the Yugoslav constitutional reforms that were adopted in 1974. It was in the mid-1970s that the first Albanian-language songs also began to be performed in the Yugoslav national selection for the ESC, although no Albanian-language

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song was ever selected as the winner. The Yugoslav national selection was, however, staged once in Kosovo, in 1986, and in that year the actor Enver Petrovci was the first and only Kosovan Albanian who ever presented the phone-in Yugoslav voting results in the ESC, and from Pristina at that. Albanian-language culture was generally marginalised in Yugoslavia which was, as its name embodied, Slavic dominated, and in which the three official languages of the state were Slavic ones, SerboCroatian, Slovenian and Macedonian. Of the twenty-six Yugoslav entries in the ESC between 1961 and 1991, twenty-two were in Serbo-Croatian and four in Slovenian. Moreover, the entries from Zagreb Television comprised eleven of the other twenty-two entries (of which five were from Serbia, four from Bosnia–Herzegovina and two from Montenegro), which reflected the fact that the Yugoslav popular music industry was centred in Croatia. Zagreb was the headquarters of the state’s leading record company, Jugoton, which also specialised in the production of the Europop that became synonymous with the ESC, especially after ABBA’s seminal victory in 1974. JRT also never submitted an Albanian-language entry to the ISC, which was held in Czechoslovakia from 1965 to 1968 and in Poland from 1977 to 1980. Albania itself was never represented in the ISC due to that state’s isolation from Eastern Europe from the early 1960s as it took the side of China in the Sino-Soviet split. On the other hand, due to Yugoslavia’s nonalignment and cultural openness, Kosovo’s Albanians were more exposed to Western cultural influences than were the citizens of Albania, which was the most isolated communist state in Eastern Europe under the government of Enver Hoxha. As a result, popular music in the Albanian language was more progressive in Yugoslavia than in Hoxha’s Albania (Krasniqi 2011, p. 337), and Yugoslavia’s Kosovan Albanians could also obviously openly watch the ESC, whereas the consumption of Western European programmes was sanctioned for the population of Albania. Although Serbs comprised one quarter of Kosovo’s population in 1961, declining to one tenth in 1991 (cited in Judah 2008, pp. 2, 51), no Serbo-Croatian-language entry from Kosovo ever made it to the ESC either, and neither did a Macedonian-language one that would have represented Macedonia. This demonstrated how there was a cultural marginalisation of Yugoslavia’s poorest regions and those which were farthest away from the Western European cultural centres that citizens of Yugoslavia’s northern republics were traditionally most oriented towards, especially Austria, France, Italy and West Germany. In Yugoslavia itself,

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landlocked Kosovo was also geo-culturally peripheral considering that the Adriatic region had developed in the early post-war decades into a cultural centre for the state as the site of major festivals—especially popular music ones—and the burgeoning tourism industry that attracted mostly Western European visitors. The Adriatic was consequently also a major motif in Yugoslavia’s ESC entries as well as the postcards that introduced these during the show (Vuletic 2010, pp. 127–128). Yet, while Kosovo was a marginalised part of Yugoslavia, and Albanian culture was marginalised in Eastern Europe, Kosovo was additionally marginalised in the ESC as other Yugoslavs felt that their state was peripheralised in the Contest in comparison to liberal democratic, non-Slavic and wealthier Western European states. Indeed, a string of poor showings by Yugoslav entries in the ESC in the 1960s and the 1970s prompted JRT to withdrew from the Contest from 1978 to 1980. However, after a poll conducted by entertainment magazines across Yugoslavia showed that there was widespread public support for JRT to re-enter the ESC, Yugoslavia was again represented in the Contest from 1981 (Vuletic 2010, pp. 130–136). During the 1980s, Yugoslav entries, most of which came from Croatia, were overall more successful in the ESC than they had been in previous decades as they adopted a formula of Europop music, peppered with foreign, usually English words (at a time when the Contest’s rules stipulated that an entry had to be sung primarily in the official language of the state that it represented), and with innocuous and typically Europop themes about holidays and love. However, against the background of this ESC success, political tensions increased in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death in 1980. In 1981, protests in Kosovo against poor economic conditions and in favour of greater autonomy for the province so that it would become Yugoslavia’s seventh republic were quashed by the Yugoslav military, as the Serbian government opposed any change to Kosovo’s status as an autonomous province of Serbia. Political tensions in Kosovo escalated over the course of the 1980s, and the Slovenian government began to criticise the suppression of Kosovan Albanians by the Serbian government as Ljubljana adopted cultural and political reforms that underlined Slovenia as the most liberal of the Yugoslav republics. Rising Serbian nationalism, fuelled in part by the crisis in Kosovo, led to the coming to power of Serbia’s president Slobodan Milošević in the late 1980s. By 1989, his government reduced Kosovo’s autonomy by taking control of the province’s economic, legal and media systems, which led to further unrest there. Against this backdrop, Milošević gave a speech at the battlefield of the Battle of Kosovo on

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the occasion of its six-hundredth anniversary, during which he portrayed Serbia as having been disadvantaged in post-war Yugoslavia because of the autonomy given to Kosovo and Vojvodina. It was in 1989 that Yugoslavia also finally won the ESC, when the Croatian group Riva was victorious with the song ‘Rock Me’. It was rather ironic that the Yugoslav victory happened then, just before the end of Europe’s Cold War division—which had been key to defining nonalignment as one of the major pillars of a Yugoslav identity. In between the staging of the ESC in Lausanne in May 1989 and in Zagreb in May 1990, communist party-led governments collapsed across Eastern Europe and multi-party elections were staged. These took place in Slovenia in April 1990 and in Croatia right around the time that the ESC was held in Zagreb: the second round of the Croatian elections occurred the day after the 1990 ESC and were won by the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union which would lead Croatia to independence in 1991. The political tensions between the Yugoslav republics were also played out at the national selection held in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian capital of Sarajevo on 9 March 1991. On that same day, the Milošević government quashed opposition street protests in Belgrade. Reflecting his government’s control of the Kosovan authorities and the boycott of these by the Albanian-majority population, the jury that represented Pristina Television was made up completely of Serbian members. The Kosovan jury, as well as those from the other republics and provinces whose governments supported Milošević—Montenegro, Serbia and Vojvodina—all backed the Serbian entry ‘Brazil’, performed by Baby Doll. On the other hand, the juries from Bosnia–Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia, whose governments all opposed Milošević’s policies, preferred the entry from Zagreb Television, Daniel and his song ‘Ma daj, obuci levisice’ (Come On, Put on Your Levi’s Jeans) (Yugoslav Radio and Television 1991). Baby Doll ultimately won the national selection. Her victory was criticised in the Croatian press as being the result of political manipulation by the Milošević government and an example of its aspirations to dominate Yugoslavia (Vrdoljak 1991), while from the Serbian perspective it redressed Croatian dominance in Yugoslavia’s ESC entries as all of these since 1986 had been submitted by Zagreb Television. By the time that the next ESC was held in 1992, Yugoslavia as it had been known no longer existed. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia were widely recognised as independent states, including with

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membership in the UN and the ITU, and in 1993 their national broadcasting organisations were also admitted into the EBU together with the Central and East European members of the dissolved OIRT. Kosovan Albanians also declared the establishment of the Republic of Kosovo in 1992, but it did not achieve international recognition as Kosovo had not been a republic in the Yugoslav federation. Despite its role in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia and the political tensions in Kosovo, a rump Yugoslavia comprised of Serbia and Montenegro still submitted an entry to the 1992 ESC, which was to be its last until 2004. Due to Kosovo remaining in this rump Yugoslavia, the province also suffered from the international sanctions that were declared against Yugoslavia, just weeks after the 1992 ESC, by the UN because of the state’s role in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. As these sanctions excluded Yugoslavia from participating in international events, JRT was consequently ejected from the ESC, which was the first and only time ever in the history of the Contest that a state was expelled from it for political reasons. Kosovo was therefore also excluded from the ESC during this period, although due to the boycott by Kosovan Albanians of Serbian and Yugoslav institutions, it would have been unlikely that a Kosovan Albanian would have represented this Yugoslavia in the ESC had the state even been permitted to participate in the Contest. It is also questionable whether Serbian officials would have considered it appropriate for their state to be represented in an international event by a citizen of Albanian ethnicity. While the first round of international sanctions against Yugoslavia were ended in 1995, there was a new wave from 1998 to 2001 due to the Kosovo War between Yugoslav forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that opposed Serbian control over the province. At the 1999 ESC that was staged in Jerusalem, the show ended with the competing artists appearing on stage with the hosts who called for peace in the Balkans. That edition of the ESC took place as NATO forces were conducting an aerial bombing campaign against Yugoslavia—during which the television transmitters of JRT, at that time a propagandistic mouthpiece of the Milošević government, were a major target—to halt the military actions of Yugoslav forces in Kosovo. The artists and hosts together sang the song ‘Hallelujah’, which had won the 1979 ESC for Israel and was considered highly symbolic then as it was performed just days after Israel had signed a peace agreement with Egypt. The Kosovo War ended on 11 June 1999 after Yugoslav forces withdrew from the province, and while Kosovo was not yet granted independence, it came

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under UN administration and was occupied by a NATO-peacekeeping force, which effectively separated Kosovo from Yugoslavia.

An Independent Kosovo Milošević—who was by then Yugoslav president—was deposed in October 2000 and extradited to The Hague in June 2001 to be tried for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. With the change of government in Serbia, the second round of sanctions against Yugoslavia were lifted and JRT was permitted to re-enter the EBU. As Montenegro had sought to redefine relations within Yugoslavia so that each of the constituent republics could more independently govern its own affairs, Yugoslavia was in 2003 transformed into a loose state union that was renamed ‘Serbia and Montenegro’. Despite the marked difference in their population sizes—Serbia’s was 7.5 million, excluding Kosovo, and Montenegro’s 600,000—the two parts of the union had an equal say in state matters such as defence and foreign affairs. Their broadcasting organisations, Radio and Television of Montenegro (RTCG) and Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS), also had an equal say in their national selection for the ESC. Serbia and Montenegro debuted in the 2004 ESC with Željko Joksimović finishing in second place with the song ‘Lane moje’ (My Darling): the song’s success was a sign of the improvement of Serbia and Montenegro’s relations with other European states, especially as the entry received top points from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia at a time when the voting was wholly based on the public televote. The former Serbian and Montenegrin foreign minister Goran Svilanović saw this as a positive development that would ‘help improve relations between the countries in the region’ (Petruseva 2005), although this example of ‘bloc voting’ would fuel criticism in the West European media against the voting predilections of the citizens of Central and East European states. Soon, however, the ESC became a political battleground between Montenegro and Serbia, as in the 2005 and 2006 national selections the representatives of RTCG were criticised for tactical voting in favour of the Montenegrin boy band No Name. The 2006 ESC turned into a tool for Montenegrin cultural diplomacy when the government of Prime Minister Milo Ðukanović scheduled a referendum on Montenegrin independence for 21 May, a day after the ESC was to be staged in Athens. In the 2006 national selection in Belgrade,

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No Name won again with the song ‘Moja ljubavi’ (My Love), whose lyrics could be read as having patriotic allusions and accordingly urging for Montenegrin independence. After RTS disputed No Name’s victory and could not come to an agreement on a common ESC entry with RTCG, Serbia and Montenegro ultimately did not participate in the 2006 ESC (Morrison 2009, pp. 215, 270). During the years that Serbia and Montenegro did participate in the ESC, Kosovan television services were no longer under the control of Belgrade and a new public service broadcaster, RTK, was instead established in 1999, with the EBU managing RTK’s transformation into an independent public service national broadcasting organisation in 2001. As RTK was thus not controlled by the Serbian national broadcasting organisation, it did not participate in the decision-making and political wrangling surrounding Serbia and Montenegro’s entries in the ESC. After the Montenegrin referendum of 2006 resulted in Montenegro declaring its independence on 3 June of that year, Montenegro and Serbia debuted in the ESC as independent states in 2007. Serbia entered the song ‘Molitva’ (A Prayer), performed by Marija Šerifović, who went on to win the Contest. Her victory improved Serbia’s image in Europe after the years of isolation, sanctions and wars in the 1990s and the political tensions with Kosovo and Montenegro, and as the Serbian government was seeking closer ties with the EU. Šerifović was even selected by the EU as an ambassador for its European Year of Intercultural Dialogue in 2008. However, it became uncertain that the 2008 ESC would be held in Belgrade after Kosovo declared its independence in February 2008. While Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain did not recognise Kosovo’s independence, all of the other member states of the EU did and, during public demonstrations in Belgrade against the independence declaration, some Western companies and embassies in Belgrade were attacked. The EBU became concerned that the security of participants in the 2008 ESC would be jeopardised, but RTS agreed to adopt extra security measures for the Contest (the Albanian and Croatian delegations were, for example, given extra bodyguards). Šerifović also stoked controversy when she supported the campaign for the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party in the national parliamentary elections that were held a fortnight before the staging of the 2008 ESC in Belgrade, elections which pro-Europeanist parties in Serbia ultimately won (Mitrović 2010, pp. 175–177). The Serbian Radical Party denounced the EU for supporting Kosovo’s independence and advocated a pro-Russian orientation for Serbia, especially as

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Russia also did not recognise Kosovo’s statehood. While RTS ensured the EBU that the 2008 ESC would not contain any political messages, the hosts did make many friendly references to ‘Europe’. The Serbian entry ‘Oro’, named after a folk dance, also made a slight reference to Kosovo as its lyrics referred to St. Vitus’ Day, 28 June, the date when Serbs were defeated in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. However, considering Moscow’s political support for Belgrade, the most politically symbolic feature of the 2008 ESC was Russia’s first ever victory in the Contest. After having since 1993 expanded to include the EBU’s new members from Central and East European states, in 2008 the last two European states to date debuted in the ESC: Azerbaijan and San Marino. Azerbaijan joined the EBU after the organisation agreed in 2004 to admit Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia by changing its membership criteria to include national broadcasting organisations from states which are members of the Council of Europe (CoE) and do not lie in the EBA. The ITU accordingly changed its definition of the EBA in 2007 to include the Transcaucasian states, adding that ‘Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and those parts of the territories of Iraq, Jordan, Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey and Ukraine lying outside the above limits are included in the European Broadcasting Area’ (International Telecommunication Union 2008, p. 5). After Azerbaijan and San Marino, there were hardly any European states left that the ESC could expand to. The only European states with full international recognition that had not yet been represented in the ESC were Liechtenstein and Vatican City. Liechtenstein, despite being one of Europe’s wealthiest states per capita, did not have a national public service broadcasting organisation and so could not join the EBU, while Vatican City was represented in the EBU but the ESC was likely not fitting for that state’s cultural diplomacy. Since Azerbaijan and San Marino, the ESC has only admitted one new participant, Australia: it is represented in the EBU by the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which is an associate and not an active member of the EBU as Australia is not located within the EBA. Australia has been exceptionally allowed to participate in the ESC since 2015, despite the EBU otherwise only allowing active members to do so, because of the large following for the ESC in Australia, where SBS has broadcast the Contest since 1983, as well as the possibility of SBS commercially expanding the Eurovision brand in Asia (Vuletic 2018, p. 210–212). Amid the EBU’s focus in 2015 on the ESC’s first expansion outside of Europe or the EBA, Kosovo was still seeking to enter the ESC as it had not yet achieved the full international recognition that could make

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it a member of the UN and the ITU. The Kosovan government and RTK have sought to enter the EBU and the ESC since the declaration of Kosovo’s independence in 2008, and they have not anticipated any financial obstacles to this despite Kosovo having one of Europe’s poorest economies. The Kosovan government has primarily viewed participation in the ESC in the context of the development of Kosovan soft power—as a tool of cultural diplomacy that could further expand its international recognition (Emra et al. 2014). Participation in the ESC would additionally be an affirmation of Kosovo’s Europeanist aspirations, as it has also been for Serbia. Although Kosovo has not yet been able to apply for membership of the EU, in part because it is not recognised by all of the EU member states, the EU played a major role in the establishment of the Republic of Kosovo, especially though the judicial and police personnel that it has deployed there since 2008 as part of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The Europeanist aspirations of Kosovo are additionally reflected in the state’s symbols, which were adopted in consideration of Kosovo’s multi-ethnic citizenry: the blue and gold colours of and stars on the flag, the wordless anthem ‘Evropa’ (Europe), and the fact that Kosovo is one of the few states in Europe that has made Europe Day, May 9, a public holiday. In 2009, an international campaign launched by the Kosovan government and designed by the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi branded Kosovo as the ‘Young Europeans’, considering that it is both Europe’s youngest state as well as the one whose population has the highest proportion of young people. The European Parliament has in its declarations on Kosovo also called for Kosovo to be admitted into the ESC (European Parliament 2016a, p. 133; 2016b, p. 73). Despite the message of political inclusion that Kosovo’s entry into the ESC could carry and the continued negotiations between RTK and the EBU, the latter has maintained that it cannot admit RTK into its ranks because Kosovo is not yet a member of the ITU, for which membership of the UN or the support of a two-thirds majority of members of the ITU is still required. In 2019, the EBU’s General Assembly rejected changes to the organisation’s statutes that would have removed the criterion of ITU membership, which would have permitted RTK to join the EBU (Smith 2019). In 2015, Kosovo had also unsuccessfully tried to enter UNESCO, which also admits non-UN members, as it did Palestine in 2011, on the basis of the support of a two-thirds majority of its members. That Kosovo was not included in these UN specialised

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agencies was ironic considering that the UN’s administration of Kosovo played a key role in constructing Kosovo’s public institutions after the Kosovo War, just as the EBU and the EU were also involved in developing these. However, Kosovo has been more successful in achieving full membership of other international organisations that have allowed the state to be represented in other international mega events: it has been recognised by the International Olympic Committee since 2014 and by FIFA since 2016. FIFA coincidentally admitted Kosovo into its ranks at the very time of the 2016 ESC, when relations between RTK and the EBU became particularly tense—ironically because of the Kosovan flag that was inspired by the European flag, whose circle of twelve stars was in 1954 pioneeringly adopted by the EBU as a symbol for its Eurovision Network for television programme exchange (Vuletic 2018, p. 32). The ESC’s Reference Group, the Contest’s steering committee, strained the EBU’s relations with RTK when it proposed for the 2016 ESC a ban on the display of certain flags, particularly ones that were not the national flags of the EBU’s members, by the ESC’s live audience. The EBU produced a list of flags that could be banned, which included the Kosovan flag that had indeed been appearing among the live audience in previous years, and the Kosovan government and RTK threatened to end their cooperation with the EBU unless the Kosovan flag was removed from the list. The Reference Group ultimately withdrew the proposed flag policy (RTK 2016). While it has not been successful in entering the ESC, RTK has found other ways to use televised international song contests in Kosovo’s cultural diplomacy. Kosovan artists have, for example, participated in the Albanian national selection for the ESC. In 2012 one of them, Rona Nishliu, who is from the Kosovan city of Mitrovica that is divided between Albanians and Serbs (Nevena Božović, who represented Serbia in the ESC in 2013 and 2019, hails from the same city), even achieved Albania’s best ever result in the ESC when she placed fifth in the final with the song ‘Suus’ (Personal). Nishliu was received by the political leaders of both Albania and Kosovo after her success in the Contest. Another Kosovan Albanian, Lindita Halimi, represented Albania in the 2017 ESC with the song ‘World’. Albania has thus turned into Kosovo’s bridge to the ESC, whereas during the Cold War the situation had been the opposite. And, as the impact of the Albanian diaspora on the public televoting results for the ESC in Italy suggest, the extensive Albanian diaspora in Europe from both Albania and Kosovo would

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likely be enthusiastic voters for a Kosovan entry in the ESC. Together with Albania, Turkey has also facilitated Kosovo’s cultural diplomacy through a televised international song contest. As Ankara’s relations with the EU have regressed in the past decade, the Erdoğan government has reoriented its foreign policy towards increasing Turkey’s influence in regions that were once a part of the Ottoman Empire, especially the Caucasus, Middle East, northern Africa and south-eastern Europe. A cultural expression of this neo-Ottomanist foreign policy was the creation in 2013 of the TSC. It was established by Türksoy (literally meaning ‘Turkic ancestry’), the International Organisation of Turkic Culture, which was set up in 1993 and is headquartered in Ankara, in cooperation with the Turkish Music Box television station and with the support of the Turkish government. The TSC began after the Turkish national broadcasting organisation withdrew from the ESC because of changes to the voting rules that have diminished the public televote—which Turkey benefitted from because of its large diaspora in Europe—and given automatic qualification for the final without having to pass the semi-final to the leading financiers of the ESC, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The TSC has included entries from public and private broadcasting organisations from Turkic regions and states from eastern and south-eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East that are members of Türksoy, as well as ones from the Turkish diaspora, including from Germany. The TSC has also reflected Ankara’s support for Pristina: Kosovo was represented on the TSC stage when the contest was held in the Turkish cities of Eskişehir and Istanbul in 2013 and 2015 respectively. As was the case with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, this has made the TSC an exceptional international event for entities that are supported by Turkey but otherwise have limited international recognition that prevents them from participating in other international mega events. However, RTK did not participate in Turkvision when it was staged in Kazan, Russia, in 2014, as Moscow continued to oppose the international recognition of Kosovo.

Conclusion For Kosovo, entering the ESC remains a goal of its cultural diplomacy, and as the successes of Nishliu in the 2012 ESC and Halimi in the 2017 ESC, as well as the international achievements of the Kosovan-English artists Dua Lipa and Rita Ora, highlight, the state has both the political

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will and the artistic talent to successfully participate in the Contest. Although the EBU has explained that it cannot admit RTK because Kosovo is not a member of the ITU or the UN, there have been precedents of the EBU bending its own rules in the past, such as when it accepted the Moroccan and Tunisian broadcasting organisations into the EBU in 1950 when they still did not come from independent states, or when it allowed SBS to enter the ESC even though it is an associate member of the EBU based outside of the EBA. The ESC should include Kosovo in order to redress its historical marginalisation in the Contest, which is also a result of the cultural and political exclusion of Kosovan Albanians in Yugoslavia and Serbia. In doing so, the EBU could underline that the Contest’s recent expansion has not just been about commercial ambition, but also about the values of cooperation and diversity that the EBU seeks to promote. With its large emigration and poor economy, Kosovo affords the EBU an opportunity to demonstrate the impact of the organisation’s values. Considering that Kosovo is the third state in Europe, after Turkey and Azerbaijan, whose population has the highest percentage of Muslims, its participation in the ESC would also send a positive message on international relations between the Muslim world and the West. Kosovo will likely be the next new European participant in the ESC as relations between it and Serbia become normalised under pressure from the EU, which Serbia has officially been a candidate to join since 2012. The ESC will then face a new challenge: to build bridges across the Mediterranean and attract entries from Middle Eastern and North African states that are located in the EBA, some of which have national broadcasting organisations that, like Kosovo when it was a part of Yugoslavia, joined the EBU before those of many European states did.

References Emra, A, Selimi, P, and Salihu, G (2014) This Is How We Do Soft Power: A Practical Guide in Public and Digital Diplomacy of a Small Republic. Pristina: British Council Kosovo and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kosovo. Eugster, E (1983) Television Programming Across National Boundaries: The EBU and OIRT Experience. Dedham, MA: Artech House. European Broadcasting Union (2012) ‘Kosovo Seeks Full EBU Membership and Song Contest Slot’, European Broadcasting Union, 30 March 2012. https:// www.ebu.ch/contents/news/2012/03/kosovo-seeks-full-ebu-membership. html.

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European Parliament (2016a) ‘European integration Process of Kosovo (16 January 2014)’, Official Journal of the European Union: Information and Notices, 59 (C482), 127–134. European Parliament (2016b) ‘The European Integration Process of Kosovo (11 March 2015)’, Official Journal of the European Union: Information and Notices, 59 (C316), 68–74. International Radiotelegraph Conference (Madrid, 1932) (1933) General Radiocommunication Regulations Annexed to the International Telecommunication Convention; Final Protocol to the General Radiocommunication Regulations; Additional Radiocommunication Regulations Annexed to the International Telecommunication Convention; Additional Protocol to the Acts of the International Radiotelegraph Conference of Madrid, Signed by the Governments of the European Region. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. International Telecommunication Union (2008) Final Acts WRC-07: World Radiocommunication Conference (Geneva, 2007). Geneva: International Telecommunication Union. Judah, T (2008) Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press. Krasniqi, G (2011) ‘Socialism, National Utopia, and Rock Music: Inside the Albanian Rock Scene of Yugoslavia, 1970–1989’, East Central Europe, 38 (2–3), 336–354. Malcolm, N (1998) Kosovo: A Short History. London: Macmillan. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kosovo (2018) ‘International Recognitions of the Republic of Kosovo’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kosovo.  https://www.mfa-ks.net/en/politika/483/njohjetndrkombtare-t-republiks-s-kosovs/483. Mitrović, M (2010) ‘New Face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: International Media Spectacle and National Identity’, European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire, 17 (2), 171–185. Morrison, K (2009) Montenegro: A Modern History. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Petruseva, A (2005) ‘Old Foes Serenade Serbia in Istanbul’, Balkan Crisis Report (499). https://iwpr.net/global-voices/old-foes-serenade-serbia-istanbul. Radio Television of Kosovo (2016) ‘RTK Management Reacts Sternly Over Eurovision Scandal’, RTK Live, 29 April 2016. https://www.rtklive.com/ en/news-single.php?ID=1954. Smith, D (2018) ‘Kosovo: RTK Membership Bid Is Reportedly Off the Agenda at December EBU Meeting’, Wiwibloggs, 7 December 2018. https://wiwibloggs.com/2018/12/07/kosovo-rtk-ebu-membershipdecember-2019/229430/.

128  D. VULETIC Smith, D (2019) ‘No Go for Kosovo: EBU Members Vote Down Proposal That Could Have Seen Kosovo at Eurovision’, Wiwibloggs, 29 June 2019. https:// wiwibloggs.com/2019/06/29/kosovo-no-ebu-membership-vote/. Vrdoljak, D (1991) ‘Yuga umire pjevajući’, Večernji list, 12 March 1991. Vuletic, D (2010) ‘European Sounds, Yugoslav Visions: Performing Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest’, in B Luthar and M Pušnik (eds) Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, 121–144. Washington, DC: New Academia. Vuletic, D (2018) Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest. London: Bloomsbury. Yugoslav Radio and Television (1991) JRT izbor za pjesmu Evrovizije – Sarajevo ‘91. Directed by S. Matić. Sarajevo: Yugoslav Radio and Television.

CHAPTER 7

Ruslana, Serduchka, Jamala: National Self-Imaging in Ukraine’s Eurovision Entries Marko Pavlyshyn

Introduction It is one of the commonplaces of scholarly reflections on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) that its principle of eschewing politics is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. This triumph of the political can come as no surprise: an utterance bereft of a political dimension is as inconceivable as an utterance free of rhetoric—free, that is, of the property of reflecting a particular interest and advocating for it before a particular audience. A Eurovision song that abides by the rule banning ‘lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature’ (European Broadcasting Union, n.d.) will nonetheless, inevitably, be readable as a political statement, more or less explicit. Indeed, the idea of a song contest devoted to European ‘goals of unity and cooperation through shared musical culture’ (Raykoff 2007, pp. 2–3), a ‘ritual in the service of the EU’s political visions for a union among the people of Europe’ M. Pavlyshyn (*)  Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_7

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(Tragaki 2013, p. 2) is political at its very roots. What is more, as perceptive students of the group psychology of the ESC have pointed out, the contest functions as an arena for the relatively harmless enactment of clashes of national identities, self-images and ambitions that would be hazardous in the sphere of inter-state politics. As Jørgen Franck, the Danish musician, broadcaster, and for a time director of the television department of the European Broadcasting Union put it, ‘the song contest is a battlefield where you can allow yourself to be a patriot. […] You can support your own country. You can say the others stink. It’s harmless but it’s very significant. If we didn’t have that battlefield, we might have more battles’ (cited in Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, p. 99). But it remains the case that Eurovision, ‘a thrilling dramatised narrative of success and failure’ (Björnberg 2007, p. 16), is about victory and defeat, where winning, for many viewers, brings as a reward the shared emotion of collective pleasure at success. For the societies of what might be called the ‘non-core’ countries of Europe—those which have only recently joined the European Union or still aspire to do so—the imperative of winning is equalled or even overshadowed by the importance of participation. Many of the songs entered for the ESC by the national broadcasters of Central Eastern and South-Eastern Europe have been analysed as implicit arguments asserting membership by the country in question of a cultural and value system accepted—at least, for purposes of the ESC—as ‘European’. Insofar as such songs articulate worldviews at all, they urge embrace of diversity and non-coercive relations among individuals and identity groups. The earnest connection made thereby to the values of the humanist and Enlightenment traditions is balanced by the rather less solemn argument that ESC entries make at the level of form and style. As a rule, contenders from the ‘non-core’ countries of Europe seek to adhere to a musical and visual formula that has established itself as the mainstream idiom of Eurovision: a formula that combines selfirony, visual excess and various degrees of erotic allusion into a whole that is frequently labelled as ‘camp’ or ‘kitsch’ (Allatson 2007). What is sought to be achieved by such professions of European faith and such reiterations of the Eurovision style? Any communicative situation, viewed from the perspective of rhetoric, comprises three components: an orator (who speaks in defence of certain identifiable interests), an audience (imagined as a holder of power who is able to resolve the case in favour of, or against, the orator); and the speech, the vehicle of persuasion. In the ESC, the ‘speeches’ are, of course, the songs themselves— their texts, music and visual accompaniments with all their affective force.

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The ‘orators’ are the performers, conceived of as advocates of worldviews and values that become discernible through interpretation. As for ESC audiences, these divide into two distinct parts: the home audience, which typically has an emotional investment in the success of ‘its own’ representative and which in many cases has participated in the selection of that representative; and the international audience, comprising listeners and viewers present at the contest venue, the millions of remote viewers witnessing the contest on television and later revisiting it on the internet, and critics and commentators of every level of professionalism on every kind of media outlet. In the case of countries that once were Soviet republics, an important subset of this international audience is what might be called the ‘post-Soviet’ audience—a substantial group for which elements of the cultural and worldview inheritance of the erstwhile Soviet Union have not lost their meanings. The existence of this culturally defined transnational group, and the fact of its real or hypothesised association with the Russian Federation, has ensured that discussion in Ukraine of that country’s ESC entries, especially when these have been controversial, has often focussed on three issues: the potential and actual Russian reaction to the song; its meaning for Ukrainians in their domestic and international predicament; and potential and actual ‘Western’ responses to it. It goes without saying that, given the multifariousness of recipients of Ukrainian cultural products—not only Eurovision songs—there is considerable scope for different, even mutually contradictory, readings. As one scholar has demonstrated in another context, a song performed by the Dakh Daughters during the Euromaidan protests was variously interpreted as ‘a fascist call-to-arms, an ironic subversion of Russian propaganda, or a new form of progressive politics articulated as aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ (Sonevytsky 2016, p. 292). Ukraine first participated in the ESC in 2003. Up to and including 2016 there had been thirteen Ukrainian entries in the contest (there were none in 2015, a year of intense military conflict with Russia and its separatist proxies in the east of Ukraine). Of these entries, the great majority—nine—dealt with the theme most common in popular song, love and its tribulations.1 Of the remaining four, three had in common the fact that they appealed to universal human and political values. ‘Razom nas bahato’ [Together We are Many], the song that made the rap group Green Jolly (Gryndzholy in Ukrainian) famous during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and became Ukraine’s entry in the 2005 contest,

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proclaimed a message of solidarity against tyranny in seven European languages. In 2010 ‘Sweet People’ by Alyosha (Olena Kucher) made a plea against war and environmental irresponsibility. Most forcefully, in 2016 Jamala’s ‘1944’ decried the murder and dispossession of innocents that accompanies war—an appeal that, though formulated in universal terms, alluded explicitly through its title to Stalin’s expulsion of the singer’s Crimean Tatar compatriots from their homeland and, implicitly, to their present plight in Crimea, occupied and annexed by the Russian Federation in 2014. The fourth, Verka Serduchka’s ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’, runner-up in 2007, was superficially a nonsense song that, however, was widely decoded as a proclamation of severance from Russia. The nine Ukrainian songs on the theme of love formulated an uncomplicated argument concerning cultural identity that was shared by many other Eurovision entries from Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe and that has been well identified in the scholarly literature. Their display of formal properties similar to those of entries from ‘mainstream’ European countries was intended to attest a command of the genre rules of Eurovision and therefore, by synecdochal implication, of the rules of Europeanness tout court. It is my objective in the following to offer a reading of Jamala’s ‘1944’ against the background of the other two most widely discussed Ukrainian Eurovision entries: Serduchka’s ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’ and Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’. ‘Dancing’ had been regarded as directly, if inexplicitly and deniably, ‘political’ in the sense that it made statements about Ukraine’s relations with its former colonial master. The argument of ‘Wild Dances’ was no less geopolitical, if less obviously so. Each of the three songs, I contend, recommended to its domestic audience and represented for its international recipients a particular model of Ukrainian identity, moulded by long gestating traditions and inflected by recently encountered circumstances.

Ruslana: The Folkloric as Global Ruslana (Ruslana Lyzhychko) won the 2004 ESC with the spectacular entry ‘Wild Dances’, of which one commentator remarked that it ‘cemented the concept that to win, the stage show has to be overwhelming, which it certainly was’ (O’Connor 2006, p. 177)—an observation that remained true until at least 2010, when the German singer Lena (Lena Meyer-Landrut) secured victory with a relatively austere

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performance of the song ‘Satellite’. The spectacular showmanship of ‘Wild Dances’ made an argument that was quite sophisticated, as I have shown elsewhere. By means of costume (furs; metal-studded leather impressed with intricate patterns), props (trembity, long straight wooden trumpets traditionally used by Hutsuls, the native inhabitants of the Carpathian Mountains), a few locutions encountered in popular songs associated with the Carpathians, and commentary generated by Ruslana herself and her team, the song and its visual accompaniment were presented to the domestic and international public alike as indebted to Hutsul folklore and material culture. At the same time, other sartorial allusions—Ruslana’s invocation of the ‘tough girl’ image familiar, for example, from the television serial ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ was scarcely accidental—proclaimed the participation of Ruslana’s spectacle in contemporary global (ergo: Western) popular culture discourse. Meanwhile, the motif of a woman’s power—the song’s lyrical subject demands of the implied male addressee that he obey her command to desire her— introduced into the song a feminist element that, likewise, represented Ruslana (and, thereby, the pre-Orange-Revolution, Europe-oriented, non-Soviet Ukrainian youth culture whose emissary she was) as sharing in the modern European or Western value system (Pavlyshyn 2006). The song developed a separate line of argument through its deployment of languages and language codes. English was the frame language through which the content of the song was made intelligible to its audience. Also present were standard contemporary Ukrainian and allusions to Hutsul dialect. Thus, the global, the national and the local environments of the song’s potential reception were acknowledged: each linguistic code represented a dimension of identity which, through the act of being invoked by the song, was declared to be relevant to contemporary Ukrainian experience. Russian was absent from the universe that Ruslana’s song thus conjured forth, less because it was deplorable than because, in Ruslana’s utopia of colonialism transcended, it was superfluous. The exclusion of Russian from the hierarchy of the song’s active cultural references, however, was carefully managed in the publicity accompanying Ruslana’s preparations for the ESC in Istanbul. The Ruslana phenomenon was promoted as being the opposite of nationally exclusive. In media appearances Ruslana underscored her embrace of Russian fans (and of the large popular-culture market of the Russian Federation and the territory of the former Soviet Union at large). In the period

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preceding escalation of Russian neo-colonial pressure on the newly independent states, the endurance of Soviet-era Russian-language dominance of the entertainment media was viewed relatively benignly by many in the successor states of the USSR. As one commentator remarked at the time with reference to Lithuania, tolerance of a Russophone popular culture sphere was not synonymous with ‘masochistic nostalgia for the Soviet past or for Russian-language hegemony’ (Ingvoldstad 2007, p. 101). Ruslana’s efforts to retain access to a broad post-Soviet receptive space was not seen as contradicting her dismissal of Soviet hierarchies or her vision of Ukraine as dynamic and Europe-focussed. At the same time, Ruslana’s song was a declaration of resistance to the kind of embrace of Europe that could readily be deconstructed as surrender to a new dominance of Europe as a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ (Sieg 2012, pp. 248–254; 2013, pp. 221–227). It refused to reinforce the gradient between West and East as a gradient between a generator of the norms of ‘European universalism’ (Wallerstein 2006, p. 49) and the uncritical and obedient imitator of these norms. Instead, through the visually overwhelming dynamism—the emphatic ‘wildness’—of ‘Wild Dances’ Ruslana figured Ukraine as a revitaliser of Europe. In media appearances Ruslana repeatedly referred to Ukraine as a force almost biological in nature and capable of rejuvenating an increasingly effete and exhausted ‘Old Europe’ (Shchotkina 2004). Ruslana’s song, then, sustains interpretation as an essentially optimistic proposal, on the one hand, for a Ukrainian identity unashamedly grounded in the authentic traditions of the people of Ukraine and, on the other, for a happy transcendence of the pangs of recent colonialism. The ESC of 2004 preceded by some six months the commencement of the Orange Revolution, a mass protest ignited by the falsification of Ukraine’s presidential elections, a process in which Russian propaganda specialists—‘political technologists’—closely linked to Vladimir Putin, then approaching the end of his first term as President of the Russian Federation, played a major role (Kuzio 2005, p. 495). Ukrainian public attitudes toward Russia cooled after the Orange Revolution, but during the publicity campaign leading up to the ESC it was still possible for Ruslana to adopt a stance sympathetic toward Russians. Her song ‘Wild Dances’ could even go so far as to imply that the old Soviet Russian cultural hegemony had been so thoroughly transcended that it could be ignored. Viewed from such a perspective, ‘Wild Dances’ appears as part of a rhetorical strategy to bring about a desired state of affairs by treating

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it as already existent: to promote the modernisation of the Ukrainian audience by flattering it with assurances that it was already within the European discursive sphere, and to persuade the global spectator and listener that this was, indeed, the case.

Serduchka: Ambivalent About Culture, Decisive on Geopolitics Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ had addressed the problematic issue of Ukraine’s unequal power relationship with Russia by positing, optimistically, a cultural world in which the former colonial relationship had been so fully consigned to history that it was unnecessary to include Russian among the languages relevant to the new Europe-oriented Ukraine. By contrast, three years later, when the gleam of the Orange Revolution had dulled and the European Union had made clear that it would not contemplate membership for Ukraine, Verka Serduchka highlighted the enduring tension between Ukrainian and Russian (more precisely, Soviet Russian) modes of cultural self-definition while enacting a sad parody of Ukraine’s European aspirations. Prior to his Eurovision adventure, Andrii Danylko had developed the persona of Verka Serduchka as a comic figure exemplifying one element of the Soviet cultural heritage in Ukraine: the practice in informal speech of unsystematically mixing Ukrainian and Russian. The resulting variety of linguistic performance, known as surzhyk, is much decried by linguistic purists in Ukraine—although surzhyk and its ambassador, Verka Serduchka, have also been understood more sympathetically as symptoms of post-Soviet cultural hybridity. According to this view, surzhyk embodies the distance between state-promoted projects to foster a traditional national identity allied to a normative literary language, on the one hand, and the lived reality of post-Soviet life, on the other. Andrii Danylko’s stage name itself was an example of surzhyk: ‘Verka’ is the diminutive of the Russian name ‘Vera’ (vs. Ukrainian ‘Vira’), while ‘Serdiuchka’ is a colloquial, but not grammatically normative feminine form of the common Ukrainian surname ‘Serdiuk’. The serdiuky of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were paid infantrymen employed by Cossack hetmans, in contrast to Cossacks proper, who were voluntary participants in the Cossack movement. The allusion to mercenary service was, perhaps, not accidental.2

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In ‘Dancing’, however, Serduchka departed from the stereotype established for her by her creator, conferring a new meaning upon surzhyk while making an audacious and explicitly anti-colonial statement. At one level the performance was an exercise in clowning: Danylko’s extravagant female impersonator’s shape was tightly encased in a glittering silver dress, while the lyrics of his song at first encounter could well be apprehended as illiterate multilingual gibberish. Closer examination, however, reveals a structured political argument. While its nuances were unlikely to have become transparent to a large proportion of listeners, its essential anticolonial message was driven home to audiences both international and domestic by the sixfold repetition of a phrase that appeared on the Eurovision website as ‘lasha tumbai’ (Danylko, n.d.) but which, when performed, sounded to many like ‘Russia, good-bye!’ (Morris 2011, p. 204). As Serhy Yekelchyk has pointed out, Russian audiences had previously been able to interpret Serduchka as a representation of Ukrainianness as amusing, peripheral and derisory; the character’s surzhyk speech branded her with colonial inferiority. That Serduchka was the fruit of a Ukrainian self-representation could be expected to add to this (unreconstructedly colonialist) audience’s pleasure: the colonial stereotype was being confirmed by the colonised subject itself. Now, in a blaze of global publicity, the carnivalesque Serduchka inverted this world order, congenial to recidivist Soviet instincts, by adopting an attitude emphatically anti-colonial (Yekelchyk 2010, pp. 229–230). Danylko’s crafty assertion that ‘lasha tumbai’ was a term signifying ‘churned butter’ in Mongolian, and the subsequent dismissal of this mystification by Mongolian authorities, only extended the longevity of the media attention lavished upon the idea of Ukraine’s farewell to Russia. For the culturally well-informed, Danylko’s ‘Russia, good-bye’ was a polite popular-culture reprise of the emphatic slogan ‘Away from Moscow’ for which Mykola Khvylʹovyi, the most provocative spokesman of the early Soviet Ukrainian literature of the 1920s, is popularly remembered. In the series of pamphlets titled ‘Apolohety pysaryzmu’ (Apologists of Scribbling, 1926) Khvylʹovyi argued that the new Ukrainian literature would be unable to develop independently unless it drew its inspiration, not from Russian literature, but from the socially progressive figures of (West) European literature (Khvylʹovyi 1978–1986, vol. 4, pp. 239–320). The phrase ‘away from Moscow’, used by Stalin in his letter to Lazar Kaganovich about Khvylʹovyi (quoted in Khvylʹovyi 1978–1986, vol. 5, p. 488) has since been adopted as

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shorthand, not only for Khvylʹovyi’s cultural autonomism, but for Ukrainian anti-colonial standpoints in general. The connection between Danylko’s slogan and Khvylʹovyi’s was pointed out, for example, in a forum sponsored by one of the major Ukrainian news sites (konstantin2a 2007). Danylko’s cultural about-face was not lost upon his Russian audiences: negative commentary appeared almost immediately, and within months he was banned from appearing on Russian television.3 But ‘Dancing’ also directed its ire or, more precisely, its resigned dissatisfaction at the frailty and, perhaps, even the incongruity of Ukrainian, ineluctably post-Soviet, aspirations to be part of Europe. The surzhyk in ‘Dancing’ was no longer the familiar low-prestige mix of Ukrainian and Russian—the song’s few lines in these languages are in the normative, if colloquial, versions of each. The new surzhyk offered to the listener is put together out of comically, even painfully, illiterate utterances in English, the language of triumphant globalism, and German, the language of the major power in the European Union. German is also—and herein lies a more sinister attestation of what the song presents as an ill fit between Ukraine and Europe—the language of the regime that occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, with well-known deadly consequences. The parodic silver uniforms and the march-like dance steps of Serduchka’s companions on stage contribute to this allusion. Having introduced himself to the globe in English (‘Hello everybody’), Verka announces in his new Anglo-German surzhyk, ‘Me English nicht verstehen’, flaunting thereby a lack of the credentials for the global citizenship that almost all Eurovision contestants seek to demonstrate by singing in English. ‘Let’s speak dance’, the song continues, inviting the listener to communicate in a pre-literate, if primal and vibrant, way; as the dancers on the Helsinki Eurovision stage performed movements parodically suggestive of dark wartime history, Serduchka repeated four times with minor variations the stanza ‘Sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju / sieben, sieben, ein [sic], zwei / sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju, / ein [sic], zwei, drei’. The line ‘sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju’, repeated eight times—even more often than ‘Russia, good-bye’—thus becomes the song’s most emphatic statement. It is not a random piece of nonsense verse, but a slightly distorted quotation from the 1968 film Brilliantovaia ruka [Diamond Arm] (Miazhevich 2012, p. 1513), one of the most popular Soviet film comedies and thus easily recognisable to post-Soviet audiences. The nature of the distortion and the detail of the reference to the film are revealing. In Leonid Gaidai’s film a rendezvous takes place in

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an Oriental-looking port city between local jewel smugglers and their inept Soviet contact (who does not speak their language). It soon dawns upon these local criminals, who speak but a few words of Russian, that they have mistakenly given their contraband to the wrong Soviet tourist, the film’s naive and virtuous hero—who, likewise, is unable to communicate in their language. They engage in a furious dialogue, invoking the phrase ‘tsygelʹ tsygelʹ ai-liu-liu’, which the hapless Soviet villain repeats as he tries to persuade them of the urgency of his returning to his ship (Gaidai 1968 at 19 minutes 46 seconds). The scenes construct a comedy of errors arising from failed communication and, more specifically, from the Soviet citizens’ ignorance of the language that they must know if they are to function effectively in a non-Soviet cultural environment. Both hero and villain are compromised by their cultural illiteracy: the villain’s suavity and Western clothing are no more a passport into the strange world beyond the Soviet borders than is the hero’s guilelessness. It is this lack of cultural fit that Verka Serduchka invokes as she intones ‘sieben, sieben, ai-liu-liu’. Exaggerating to the point of self-parody the kitsch dress code of Eurovision does not make her European; nor does substituting ‘sieben’ for ‘tsybelʹ’ enable her to communicate in a European code. The final twist of Serduchka’s satire derives from the fact that the ‘foreign language’ that the Soviet characters encounter in the foreign country is not a language at all, but a macaronic succession of sounds agreed upon between director and actors on the eve of the shoot (Vokrug.kino, n.d.). Thus, post-Soviet isolation from ‘the foreign’ is raised to a higher power: the foreignness to which Verka alludes is not even ‘real’ foreignness, but foreignness as invented for the Soviet audience by the Soviet film industry. ‘Dancing’ thus begins by constructing Europe and the West as out of communicative reach for the post-Soviet person; the desideratum ‘I want to see – Russia, good-bye’ forms the middle of the song and its main statement. What remains, with the western and eastern Others thus out of the picture? Why, the Self: Ukraine. Switching to Ukrainian, and thus narrowing the comprehending part of the audience to his Ukrainian compatriots and (given the simplicity of the Ukrainian text) the recently farewelled Russians, Verka asks, ‘Ukraïna – tse kruto?’ [Ukraine—is that cool or what?] and ‘Ukraïna – tse klʹovo?’ [Ukraine—is that awesome or what?] ‘Kruto’, and ‘klʹovo’, voices in the Helsinki audience are heard to reply, affirmatively. A vaguely folkloric-sounding non-verbal vocal obbligato follows; it, and the song itself, end abruptly with Serduchka’s

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spoken words, ‘OK, happy end’. The performance has reached a conclusion, and so has the song’s story of possible identities. The one still standing at the end is the national. The song offers no guidance as to whether this affirmation of a Ukrainian national self is to be taken (‘happily’) at face value, or ironically, like most of the Serduchka oeuvre.

Jamala: Minority Part for National Whole Writing about Gaitana, a singer of Congolese and Ukrainian descent who was Ukraine’s representative in the 2012 ESC, a scholar approvingly observed that the Contest reflects the diversity, including the racial diversity, of contemporary nations: ‘the flesh and blood of the nation [is present] on the ESC stage, … a site on which neoliberal European values of belonging are performed’ (Tragaki 2013, p. 11). Others have thought such choices of singers from minority groups to be mendacious gestures by the cultural establishments of countries which have recently joined the European Union or aspire to do so: designed as demonstrations of the multicultural tolerance favoured by a liberal West, they mask discrimination against minorities at home (Sieg 2012, p. 255). Whatever the motivations behind their choice, televoters participating in the selection of Ukraine’s 2016 ESC representative clearly supported the Crimean Tatar singer Jamala (Susana Camaladinova) for the role. 382,500 SMS votes—a Ukrainian record—were received. According both to the voters and the expert panel, the two leaders were Jamala and The Hardkiss, who tied on points. The judges preferred The Hardkiss, but according to the rules the popular vote prevailed (Meniv 2016). For the voting public, the question of whether a member of an ethnic minority within Ukraine could stand for the country as a whole had been resolved in the affirmative, as it was, after her victory, for many of the public figures who congratulated her. Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko tweeted that ‘today through her voice the whole of the Ukrainian people spoke to the world’ (Ukraïns'ka pravda 2016a). The prime minister, Arsenii Iatseniuk, was equally ready to underscore Jamala’s Ukrainianness, as well as the Ukrainianness of Crimea: ‘Bravo Jamala! A brilliant and deserved victory. Ukraine wins and will continue to win. Crimea will be Ukrainian’. The same topoi were invoked by the foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin: ‘The truth always wins as Jamala and Ukraine did tonight. Congratulations and many thanks :) And please don’t forget that #CrimeaisUkraine’ (Ukraïnsʹka pravda 2016a).

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Many Crimean Tatars rejoiced in Jamala’s victory as a triumph for the Crimean Tatar cause. In a widely recirculated Facebook post the journalist Sevgil Hayretdın Qızı Musaieva, for example, wrote, ‘You can’t even imagine what all Crimean Tatars feel at the moment—both in occupied Crimea and far from their homeland! Last week was especially hard. More searches, arrests, charges brought against İlmi Ümerov, and suddenly such joy—on the eve of the Day of Commemoration of the Victims of Deportation! Europe has heard us! When I say that we shall certainly return to Ukrainian Crimea, I’m not making presumptions! I know! Because our whole people is just as incredible as Jamala!’ (Musaieva 2016). Crimean Tatar political leaders, on the other hand, were at pains to underscore Jamala’s connection simultaneously to the Crimean Tatar people and to Ukraine. For example, Refat Chubarov, president of the Mejlis, the parliament-like representative body of Crimean Tatars, and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, phrased his congratulatory message as follows: ‘On behalf of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People I congratulate all citizens of Ukraine and our many friends in other countries on Jamala’s brilliant victory in Eurovision. We are witness to the unbelievably large number of true admirers of Jamala’s talent, friends of independent Ukraine and allies of the Crimean Tatar people’ (Ukraïns'ka pravda 2016a). The embrace of Jamala as a representative of Ukraine was praised by some commentators as symptomatic of the kind of civic nation that, in their view, Ukraine had become: ‘By choosing a representative of the Crimean Tatar people to take part in Europe’s most popular song contest Ukrainians demonstrated their civic maturity and their respect for their compatriots from Crimea’, a Warsaw Ukrainian-language newspaper editorialised (Nashe slovo 2016). Two rightist politicians who objected to Jamala on the grounds that she was not a native Ukrainian were excoriated in social media (depoua 2016). Jamala’s song reflected both the tribulations of her family and the modern history of the Crimean Tatars. Jamala was born in 1983 in Kyrgyzstan, the daughter of an Armenian mother and a Crimean Tatar father. In 1989 Jamala and her family were able to resettle in her father’s homeland as part of the large-scale return to Crimea by deportees and their descendants. The family’s story was symptomatic of the fate of the Crimean Tatars. Deported after the Second World War to Uzbekistan and other parts of Soviet Central Asia, they suffered a catastrophic deathrate during the deportation and in the first years of resettlement

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(Williams 2015, pp. 86–116 and 109). Mainstream Soviet and, in many cases, post-Soviet discourse cultivated the stereotype of Crimean Tatars as a ‘traitor nation’ (Bezverkha 2017, p. 128).4 The term ‘genocide’ was avoided in Russian-language discussions of Crimean Tatar history, and even the word ‘deportation’ was typically replaced by euphemisms. Authorities before and after the disintegration of the USSR pursued ‘naturalization of the idea of the unity of all ethnic groups in Crimea under the tutelage of the Russian cultural and political majority’ (Bezverkha 2017, p.136). After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 pressure on the Crimean Tatars moved from the discursive to the practical: the independent television station ATR, which broadcast in Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar, was closed and replaced with a station funded by the government of the Russian Federation (Moscow Times 2015); the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar parliament-like representative body, was banned (Cooper 2016); many Crimean Tatars were subjected to house searches and arrests (Sharkov 2016); and Crimean Tatar activists faced harassment and prosecution on false charges (Amnesty International 2016, pp. 3–10). Unsurprisingly, given the prohibition of explicit political content in the ESC, Jamala generally underplayed the contemporary political significance of ‘1944’, insisting that the song was a personal lament stimulated by memories of her great grandmother’s accounts of the tribulations of her family during and after deportation. In an interview given a month before the 2016 ESC, for example, Jamala said that ‘the roots [of this song] are in my childhood. When I was five, my great grandmother told of how they experienced deportation. She had five children; only four survived. […] This tragedy is not a story about what happened somewhere to somebody. It happened in my home; it was to my place specifically that they came’ (My Vin 2016). In some interviews, however, Jamala’s reflections on family experiences spilled over into remarks about the present which, inevitably, implied criticism of the Russian annexation of Crimea: ‘Of course it’s about 2014 as well. These two years have added so much sadness to my life. Imagine, you’re a creative person, a singer, but you can’t go home for two years. You see your grandfather on Skype who is 90 years old and ill, but you can’t visit him. What am I supposed to do: just sing nice songs and forget about it? Of course I can’t do that’ (The Guardian 2016). Such inability to forget was articulated in the lyrics of ‘1944’, composed by Jamala in collaboration with the Armenian poet Art Antonian

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in the simple and not entirely idiomatic English that often characterises the lyrics of East European Eurovision contributions. The pathos of the song is universalist. It opens, not with the narrative of a particular atrocity inflicted on particular historical victims, but with a dark statement about the general nature of deadly violence that can be exercised by one group (‘strangers’) against another (hapless innocents, murdered in their own homes) and the subsequent denial of responsibility by the victorious perpetrators: ‘They kill you all / and say, / We’re not guilty / not guilty’ (Eurovision Song Contest 2017; all quotations from ‘1944’ follow this text). Using the second-person pronoun ‘you’, the song addresses the whole of its audience as potential victims. The song condemns such a state of affairs—the outcome of worldviews that divide people into one’s own kind, and strangers—from an ethical position inspired by values and convictions that have their roots in the European Enlightenment. ‘Humanity’—the human race conceived of as a totality undivided into Self and Stranger—is appalled, and urges the perpetrators to exercise their reason, the faculty which, as Enlightenment consensus would have it, people have in common regardless of cultural difference: ‘Where is your mind? / Humanity cries’. Mortality (‘everyone dies’) stands as evidence of the irreducible equality of humans and rebuts the supremacist claims—indeed, presumptions akin to those of Satan (‘you think you are gods’)—of those who would dominate through violence. Violence, the lyrical subject urges, must not consume the spiritual dimension of humanity, whether individual or collective: ‘Don’t swallow my soul, / Our souls’. After its initial appeal to human reason, solidarity and spirit, the song briefly abandons its universalist diction to formulate, in the refrain, a personal lament that alludes transparently to the Crimean Tatar predicament: the aggressor has deprived the lyrical subject of a youth spent in her (or his) homeland and thus of the state of being that the song designates as ‘peace’. The change is paralleled and underscored by the song’s shift from English to Crimean Tatar. The second half of the song returns briefly to the universalist plane and resumes the pathos and conceptual vocabulary of the Enlightenment, proclaiming the potential for utopia that resides in humanity and proceeds from the emotional dimension of the human that augments the rational: ‘We could build a future / Where people are free / to live and love. / The happiest time. // Where is your heart? / Humanity rise’. If in the song’s first half the lyrical subject had

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challenged the aggressors’ ‘mind’, it now appeals to their ‘heart’. The song’s utopian vision encompasses freedom and happiness, but also the assurance of life (in defiance of the threat from those who choose to behave as ‘strangers’) and the liberty to exercise the most intense form of solidarity, love. Utopia, however, remains only a possibility, its fragility signalled by the lyrical subject’s return to those historically attested realities that necessitate reiteration of the two entreaties made in the first half of the song: that the perpetrators of violence abandon their presumption of godhead and, second, that the human soul, individual and collective, resist capture by the ‘strangers’’ culture of violence and hate. Who is the implied addressee of Jamala’s song? It is not the bifurcated audience that one scholar concluded to be Verka Serduchka’s virtual Ukrainian interlocutor, one part nostalgic for the Soviet past, the other pro-Ukrainian and concerned lest the ‘Ukrainian brand’ be undermined by such as Serduchka (Miazhevich 2012, p. 1517). The song does not allude to particular nations or national minorities. Its ideal audience is humanity at large. Of course, some members of the audience—the real people who listen to Jamala at home and throughout the world—may well be less universalist in outlook than the lyrical subject of Jamala’s song. If the song acknowledges them at all, it does so implicitly, through a version of captatio benevolentiae, the topos of flattery: one seeks to modify the outlook of one’s addressees by praising them for being (already) what they are not (yet). You, too, the song implies, are part of the consensus upholding universal human virtue and decrying violence. The seriousness of the text of ‘1944’, together with the relative sobriety of Jamala’s costume and stage demeanour, challenged the kitsch cultural style generally associated with the ESC.5 As one Ukrainian commentator put it, ‘Not only does Jamala’s song refuse to be an easy-entertainment pop music hit; it also reminds West Europeans that they are surrounded by a multitude of things about which it is unpleasant, but necessary, to think’ (Fediuk 2016). Textually and visually, Jamala’s performance paid little homage to the Eurovision ‘ultra-mainstream’ (Björnberg 2007, p. 20), only partly manifesting the features that one study identified as definitive for a Eurovision entry: the song’s catchy and singable quality; the projection of the contestant’s character as embodying youth, naïveté, and energy; emphasis on the contestant’s sex appeal, underscored by revealing or provocative costume; and lyrics predominantly in English (Meerzon and Priven 2013, p. 115). Jamala took up a position outside the paradigm of ‘post-Soviet performances, with their

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excessive aesthetics and aberrant sexuality, [which] can be read in terms of an implicit dialogue with West European constructions of “bad taste”’ (Miazhevich 2012, p. 1507). Polemical distance from the idiom of West European bad taste went hand in hand, in Jamala’s song, with a reaffirmation, as demonstrated above, of ethical and political virtues once revered as West European and with a reconnection to the Enlightenment tradition of humane universalism. But the universality of the song’s message did not obscure its relevance to the contemporary Crimean situation. One commentator eloquently pointed out the interconnection of the two: ‘Jamala […] called out to the whole world about the tragedy of human destinies affected by totalitarianism and war. Now every viewer will ask, “What happened in Crimea in 1944? What’s happening there now?”’ (Nashe slovo 2016). The argument implied by Jamala’s song and its victory in the ESC was perceived as a strong one by supporters of the Russian annexation of Crimea, who quickly mobilised a counteroffensive. Among the more innocuous Russian responses were efforts to neutralise the critical content of the song. The television channel Rossiia-1, for example, paraphrased ‘1944’ as a ‘prayer for people who willingly or unwillingly leave their homes in quest of a better life’ (Ukraïns'ka pravda 2016b). Less gentle were the many iterations of the main motif of anti-Crimean Tatar prejudice—the labelling of Crimean Tatars as a nation of collaborators on the grounds that some Crimeans had served in German military units during the Second World War (e.g., Sotirovic 2016). Sergei Lazarev, Russia’s entry in the contest, was reasonably successful, coming third, but his failure to secure first place where the winner was Ukraine, represented by a Crimean Tatar, in the context of the annexation of Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas, was experienced as especially irksome by practically the whole of the Russian commentariat.6 (Australia, which came second, was seen as irrelevant to the real battle.)

Conclusion: Envisioning the Culturally Multifaceted Nation Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ had offered an optimistic project for a Ukrainian national identity and an activist role for Ukraine in the world. Serduchka accomplished an altogether more complex task. On the one hand, Andrii Danylko presented to the international audience, in the midst of one of

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the most quintessential distillations of Eurovision kitsch, the defiant and audacious image of Ukraine turning its back on Russia. On the other hand, for Ukrainian audiences Danylko produced an affirmation of their homeland as ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’, albeit within the context of a parodic dramatisation of his compatriots’ unreadiness—alongside that of the whole post-Soviet world—for Europe. ‘Dancing’ was, in this sense, a tarantella over the tragicomic inevitability of a self-regarding nationalism. Jamala’s ‘1944’, more than Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ or Serduchka’s ‘Dancing’, insisted on a Europe of principles. Unlike Ruslana or Serduchka, Jamala in her ESC entry did not mount a discussion concerning the real or desirable relationships between Ukraine, Europe and the post-Soviet cultural space. Rather, she invoked as already existing a single virtuous identity for all—an identity simply human, and one that eo ipso mandated humane behaviour toward one’s fellow human being. The refrain in Crimean Tatar, lamenting, as it did, a youth far from home and the deprivation of peace, was no less universalist than the rest of the song. The Crimean Tatar language was not, in this instance, a signal of the uniqueness of the Crimean Tatar predicament, but an attestation that Crimean Tatars share in the same universal humanity, possess the same moral instincts, and respond in the same way to hurt, as all of the human beings addressed by the personal pronoun ‘you’. Crimean Tatar is, thus, the language of the Crimean Tatars, but it is also a language of Ukraine, of Europe and of the world. Jamala’s song attests to the reality and importance of nation, but in a manner reminiscent of Johann Gottfried Herder and his advocacy of the distinctive cultures of the peoples of the world as manifestations of a single humankind. A nation—in this instance, the Crimean Tatar nation—has rights (to a home, to safety, to youth in peace) by virtue of being one of the many incarnations of humanity. What the three Ukrainian ESC songs discussed above have in common is recognition of the culturally multifaceted nature of Ukraine. Perhaps the unwritten rules of the genre of the Eurovision song impose multiculturalism as the compulsory ethos of the ESC. But the inflections of the multicultural by Ruslana, Serduchka and Jamala, all of whom in their own way pay homage to Europe, differ in important nuances. Ruslana’s ‘Wild Dances’ celebrates the local as pars pro toto for the national and offers a vibrant Ukraine to an effete Europe as part of a deal: accept us as one of your own, and we shall rejuvenate you. Serduchka’s ‘Dancing’ accepts the cultural (and, especially, linguistic)

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diversity of Ukraine as a fact, but a dispiriting one: a fact that creates boundaries and gradients of prestige. Jamala takes as a given the cultural multifariousness of Ukraine that can make Crimean Tatar the language that is as representative of the country as Ukrainian, and turns the particularities of one national past (that of 1944) and of one national present (that of 2013–2016) into a lament over humankind’s deadly fallibility and a hymn to humankind’s utopian potential.

Notes 1. For a quantitative study of the prevalence, and trends in the representation, of the erotic in popular song, see Madanikia and Bartholomew (2014). 2. For an account of surzhyk and the debates surrounding it as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, see Bilaniuk (2005), especially Chapter 4, ‘Surzhyk: A History of Linguistic Transgressions’. 3. For an account of the phases in Danylko’s fall from grace in the Russian Federation, see Dyczok (2009, p. 382). 4. Bezverkha’s article is based on pre-invasion data collected in 2010–2012. 5.  For discussions of the dominion of kitsch in Eurovision, see especially Miazhevich (2012, p. 1506), and Allatson (2007, p. 87). 6. For documentation of Ukrainian and Russian media coverage of Jamala’s victory, see Lefter (2016), and Burkovsʹkyi (2016).

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148  M. PAVLYSHYN V. Serdiuchka: ‘Russia, Good-Bye’], Ukraïnsʹka pravda, 19 May 2007. https:// forum.pravda.com.ua/index.php?topic=195392.0. Accessed 26 April 2017. Kuzio, T (2005) ‘Russian Policy Toward Ukraine During Elections’, Demokratizatsiya, October 2005, 491–517. https://doi.org/10.3200/ demo.13.4.491-518. Accessed 13 December 2018. Lefter, S (2016) ‘Pislia “Ievrobachennia”: Iak kanaly pereishly vid mystetstva do polityky’ [After ‘Eurovision’: How TV Channels Went from Art to Politics], Detektor mediia, 28 May 2016. http://detector.media/kritika/ article/115529/2016-05-28-pislya-evrobachennya-yak-kanali-pereishli-vidmistetstva-do-politiki/. Accessed 6 April 2017. Madanikia, Y, and Bartholomew, K (2014) ‘Themes of Lust and Love in Popular Music’, Sage Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014547179. Accessed 14 December 2018. Meerzon, Y and Priven, D (2013) ‘Back to the Future: Imagining a New Russia at the Eurovision Song Contest’, in K Fricker and M Gluhovic (eds) Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, 111–124. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Meniv, A (2016) ‘Ievrobachennia-2016: Hliadachi za Dzhamalu, suddi za “The Hardkiss”’ [Viewers for Jamala, Judges for ‘The Hardkiss’], Halytsʹkyi korespondent, 21 February 2016. http://gk-press.if.ua/yevrobachennya-2016-glyadachi-za-dzhamylu-suddi-za-the-hardkiss/. Accessed 26 April 2017. Miazhevich, G (2012) ‘Ukrainian Nation Branding Off-Line and Online: Verka Serduchka at the Eurovision Song Contest’, Europe-Asia Studies, 64 (8), 1505–1523. Morris, J (2011) ‘Elevating Verka Serdiuchka’, in H Goscilo and V Strukov (eds) Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic, 195–218. Oxford: Routledge. Moscow Times (2015) ‘Russia to Fund Crimean Tatar TV After Forcing Independent Channel to Close’, Moscow Times, 15 April 2015. https:// themoscowtimes.com/articles/russia-to-fund-crimean-tatar-tv-after-forcingindependent-channel-to-close-45778. Accessed 15 December 2018. Musaieva, S H Q (2016) ‘Vy dazhe ne predstavliaiete…’ [You Cannot Even Imagine…], Facebook, 15 May 2016. https://www.facebook.com/sevgil. musaieva/posts/10208176463905851. Accessed 20 June 2017. My Vin (2016) ‘13 kvitnia Dzhamala pryïde u Vinnytsiu do “rodychiv”’ [On 13 April Jamala Will Visit Her ‘Relatives’ in Vinnytsia], My Vin, 7 April 2016. http://www.myvin.com.ua/ru/news/culture/41457.html. Accessed 19 June 2017. Nashe slovo (2016) ‘Krymotatarsʹka peremoha Dzhamaly’ [Jamala’s Crimean Tatar Victory], Nashe slovo, 22 May 2016. http://www.nasze-slowo.pl/%D0% BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BC%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82% D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0-%D0%

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150  M. PAVLYSHYN Wallerstein, I (2006) European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: New Press. Williams, B G (2015) The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest. London: Hurst. Yekelchyk, S (2010) ‘What Is Ukrainian About Ukraine’s Pop Culture? The Strange Case of Verka Serduchka’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 44, 217–232.

CHAPTER 8

Nation Branding, Cultural Relations and Cultural Diplomacy at Eurovision: Between Australia and Europe Jess Carniel

Introduction Scholars of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) have long focused on the significant political and economic roles the Contest plays for participating nations. They have shown it to be an important stage for performing the nation as new states emerged after the dismantling of the USSR (Jordan 2014; Meerzon and Priven 2013; Sieg 2013; Vuletic 2007), as both a drain and a boon to national and regional economies, and an important platform for a growing discourse of liberal gender politics as a European value (Halliwell 2018; Baker 2017; Carniel 2015; Lemish 2004). Like sporting events such as the Olympics, the Song Contest is perceived as a safe arena for national competitiveness to play out and for international relationships to be fostered, developed, or even be performed in more negative terms. It is thus a space in which the soft power politics of nation branding, cultural relations, and cultural J. Carniel (*)  University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_8

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diplomacy can be exercised. Notably, the Contest uses the language of diplomacy, as countries send ‘delegations’ and the competing artists are often characterised as ‘ambassadors’. Australia’s entrance into the Contest in 2015 thrust it into this particular realm of soft power politics, thus necessitating an investigation of what the Contest could also mean for Australian relations with Europe as well as its current and future relations within its own Indo-Pacific geographical region. Using examples of postcards (the short clips that appear between each song), performances, fan interactions, and delegation activities, this chapter examines Australian representation and participation in the ESC through the concepts of nation branding, cultural relations, and cultural diplomacy. Doing so facilitates an assessment of how both nation branding and cultural relations can form an important part of policies and strategies in cultural diplomacy. The image presented by national delegations at Eurovision is a form of nation branding constructed by nonstate actors, specifically media and corporate entities, and their activities at the Song Contest perform important work in developing cultural relations. These also occur at a more vernacular level amongst the fans who are complicit in the nation branding process but also powerful agents in cultural relations. The outcomes of these activities can and should form part of the cultural diplomacy strategies performed by state actors. Importantly, at the ESC, nation branding, cultural relations, and cultural diplomacy can all occur concurrently without consultation or collaboration, with varying results. From its outset, the Song Contest was imagined as a means of bringing Europe together through a shared cultural event—alongside the far more prosaic goal of promoting the European Broadcasting Union’s new Eurovision distribution network (O’Connor 2015). Such a goal underlines the event’s usefulness as a form of cultural relations, certainly, but with significant potential to be utilised in cultural diplomacy and nation branding. The inclusion of Australia within the Song Contest raises the question of what diplomatic role it can play in Australia’s relations with European nations, as does the prospect of the Eurovision Asia Song Contest for Australian foreign relations in the Indo-Pacific region. Before these elements can be identified and unpacked in the context of the Contest, it is important to understand how they are defined and how they operate, particularly as these fields frequently intersect and overlap.

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Culture in International Relations: Branding, Relations, and Diplomacy With acknowledgement of the significant doubts of its veracity and origin, a quote often attributed to Jean Monnet, one of the found­ ing figures of the European Union, is, ‘If I had to do it again, I would begin with culture’ (quoted in Mokre 2007). Monika Mokre (2007) suggests that perhaps culture is not a sound basis for a political project but that it is nevertheless important to political and economic systems. As Glen Fisher (1997, p. 42) observes, ‘people view international issues and events through a cultural lens,’ yet culture is frequently one of the last considerations in international relations, if it is not left out entirely. Fisher’s ‘mindsets’ theory illustrates effectively how culture is an integral aspect of international relations as it determines the very nature and tone of those relations, but in focusing on a more ‘psychocultural dimension’ of international relations, Fisher is somewhat dismissive of culture as it relates to the arts and similar products. By contrast, Ien Ang et al. (2015) present an understanding of culture and cultural policy in international relations derived from contemporary cultural theory. This approach acknowledges the role that cultural exchange and collaboration can play in public diplomacy because of the relational dimensions that can be embedded into those sorts of projects, which can be as diverse as artist residencies or student exchange programs. Important to this is the role that people, specifically non-state actors, play in forms of cultural exchange, which Lowe (2015, p. 449) frames in terms of a ‘vernacular internationalism’. This cultural relations work performed by non-state actors, such as everyday citizens but also, as is the case in Eurovision, media outlets and entities, can in turn further the work of cultural diplomacy but may not have the same measurable impacts of other diplomatic programs (Ang et al. 2015). By its very definition, cultural diplomacy sees culture as a diplomatic tool to further national interest. In its strictest sense, cultural diplomacy refers to the utilisation of culture by state actors and their agents (Ang et al. 2015). It is adjacent to public diplomacy, which is primarily concerned with how public attitudes affect foreign policy (Szondi 2008), thus frequently uses the tools of media and communication that can also be important in contemporary cultural diplomacy. Scholars generally concur that Milton Cummings’ definition of cultural diplomacy is the most comprehensive: ‘the exchange of ideas, information, art and other

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aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding’ (cited in Ang et al. 2015, p. 367), acknowledging also that this is as often as not a one-sided transmission rather than a mutual exchange. This one-sidedness is partly explained by cultural and public diplomacy’s connection to nation branding as these concepts share the goal of improving the international image of the nation in order to better serve its political and economic interests. Gyorgy Szondi (2008) urges for a distinction between concepts of diplomacy and branding, arguing that nation branding is invested in ideas of foreign consumption of the nation (for example, via tourism or buying that country’s products), whereas public diplomacy is aimed at the public’s hearts and minds rather than their hip pockets. Cultural and public diplomacy differ in that the latter is concerned with public perceptions of foreign policy (particularly as it affects execution) and the former centres upon cultural exchange as a means of fostering mutual understanding, which may in turn improve perceptions of the state and its policies. Zrinka Borić and Ana Radović Kapor (2017, p. 225) identify cultural policy as the ‘third pillar of foreign policy’ alongside the foci of traditional diplomacy, politics and economics. Using the ESC as their primary example, they argue that culture, in the form of cultural diplomacy, can and should take a greater role in international relations practice and theory in the era of globalisation. Although it would be naive to suggest that the spheres of political, economic and cultural influence have ever been entirely distinct from each other, the increased global flows of people, ideas, money, and products in the twenty-first century have disrupted older systems and understandings of these spheres. Scholars acknowledge that globalisation has led to greater permeability between various concepts centred upon culture and international relations and their practices. For Ang et al. (2015, p. 371), the processes of globalisation have complicated any clear differentiation between cultural diplomacy and cultural relations because the power structures maintaining those differences are collapsing, reflecting a ‘diminishing authority’ of national governments in a world of cultural and economic flux. Szondi (2008) locates this within the collapsing of the public and private sectors and the infiltration of business and marketing language in public policy and practice. While Szondi is primarily concerned with the false convergence of nation branding with cultural and public diplomacy, Ang et al. (2015, p. 365) warn against conflation of

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cultural diplomacy with cultural relations. Cultural relations, they argue, are largely practiced by non-state actors, but these may receive state support or sponsorship, which contributes to a blurring of these lines. These can have outcomes for state goals, such as positive image and receptiveness to foreign policy, but these are not its core objectives. Ang et al. argue for a greater consideration of cultural policy within a foreign policy approach that supports and encourages the vernacular work of cultural relations alongside state-led cultural diplomacy. Working within a domestic rather than regional framework, Australian cultural policy has, understandably, been more nationally-focused, but has nevertheless generally given room to the role cultural programs can play in international relations. No cohesive federal cultural policy framework is currently in place, which is an important context for understanding Ang et al.’s views of cultural policy and diplomacy discussed above. The last policy implemented was Creative Australia, established by the Labor government under Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013. This was the successor to the only other cultural policy framework, Creative Nation (Australian Government 1994), also delivered by a Labor government under Prime Minister Paul Keating. Despite the current lack of cohesive framework, there exists a ministerial portfolio in Communication and the Arts to determine domestic policy. The international dimension of cultural policy, particularly the role of cultural diplomacy, is located within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Most tellingly, the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper identified ‘soft power’ as an area requiring further consideration within foreign policy strategising, prompting a ‘Soft Power Review’ (underway at the time of writing; DFAT 2018b). Since 2015, DFAT has offered an Australian Cultural Diplomacy Grants Program (ACGDP) that supports initiatives that ‘promote our economic, artistic, and cultural assets to an international audience’ (DFAT 2018a). Although it would be difficult to argue that the Australian government sees a prominent role for culture, the white paper and the ACDGP nevertheless position soft power as ‘vital to our foreign policy’ (DFAT 2017, p. 109). The white paper’s overview emphasises the role that non-state actors play in this process and also highlights the importance of developing a ‘stronger national brand’ (DFAT 2017, p. 110). In the European context, such policies must be considered within the context of both the national and the regional, but due to the sheer number and diversity of nations involved, I focus here on the prospect

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of a ‘European’ cultural policy. As Dean Vuletic (2018, p. 18) observes, the ESC provided Western Europe with a set of shared cultural references and the makings of a unified European identity decades before the various governing bodies of the European community developed clear cultural policies. The various institutions that underpin modern Europe and its primary instrument, the European Union, were focused primarily upon economic cooperation but, given the climate of the Cold War in which they emerged, the capitalist economics of the West were implicitly politicised (Mokre 2007). Cultural policy in the Maastricht Treaty centres upon the maintenance of national identity and diversity while also developing a common European identity and shared heritage, mirroring the objectives set out earlier by the European Community’s ‘Declaration on European Identity’ at Copenhagen in 1973. Espousing a shared identity and the maintenance of distinct national identities, as Mokre (2007) highlights, are two conflicting objectives. While these still underpin contemporary cultural policy in the European Union, there is now greater recognition of the role culture plays in internal and external international relations for the EU as evidenced in a 2016 joint communication to the European Parliament and Council outlining the cultural policy strategy that is now currently in place. With a greater emphasis on inter-culturalism and cooperation, this document identifies international cultural relations as a means to ‘promote international peace and stability, safeguard diversity, and stimulate jobs and growth’ (European Commission 2016). The ESC is not identified as a particular example in either the Australian or European Union discussions of culture, cultural relations, and cultural diplomacy, but must nevertheless be understood within these contexts. Culture at the ESC is instrumentalised economically and politically by a variety of state, non-state, and industry actors, including embassies, the media, fans, and the artist delegations themselves. The fact that it is a non-governmental event fails to obscure the fact that it is nevertheless political, and that individual citizens can be the unwitting agents of national politics and identity in an international arena.

Understanding Australia’s Place at Eurovision (and in the World) While many accepted Jessica Mauboy’s 2014 interval act and Guy Sebastian’s 2015 ‘wild card’ entry as gimmicks to mark the 60th anniversary of the Song Contest, Australia’s ongoing participation in the

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Contest is met with ambivalence primarily because Australia is not located within Europe or its region. As the BBC’s Eurovision commentator Graham Norton pointed out, Australia is ‘on the other side of the world’ (quoted in Wooton 2016). Australia is located within the Indo-Pacific region, but historically it has expressed discomfort or anxiety about its geographical location. Historian Geoffrey Blainey (1991) famously argued that Australia’s history and identity has been shaped by what he terms the ‘tyranny of distance’; that is, Australian history has been shaped by its relative remoteness from other parts of the world. In order to bridge this distance between Australia and Europe, a discourse of historical connection and contemporary shared values has emerged as an important strategy in legitimising the Australian presence at an ostensibly European song contest, just as shared values and heritage were important concepts in forging a united European identity. This discourse in turn has implications for contemporary cultural, political, and economic relations between Australia and Europe. As EBU Reference Group Chair Dr. Frank-Dieter Freiling stated in regard to Australia’s continuing participation in the Song Contest, Eurovision is ‘a way for many Australians to re-connect with their European roots, and celebrate our shared cultural values and understanding through music’ (quoted in Jordan 2015). Michael Ebeid, the former Managing Director of the multicultural broadcaster that televises Eurovision in Australia, Special Broadcasting Services (SBS), further specifies these shared values as ‘cultural diversity and social inclusion’ (quoted in Jordan 2015). In 2018, a formal motion in the Australian Senate wishing Jessica Mauboy success in Lisbon similarly drew upon ideas of international community, cultural diversity and, importantly, the role the Contest plays in ‘providing a connection to countries from which many Australians have emigrated’ (Australian Senate 2018). This is what I have termed elsewhere as the ‘European connection narrative’ (Carniel 2018). Such a narrative uses the history of European migrations to Australia to emphasise affective attachment and cultural proximity to legitimise Australian interest in the Song Contest. It positions Australia alongside (western) Europe in a tradition of liberal, democratic progress, emphasising these as values exemplified by the Song Contest, and underscoring these similarities and alignments as important enough to override geographical logic. Both concepts of the tyranny of distance and the European connection narrative are intrinsically Eurocentric. They define ‘the world’ as Europe broadly, and the United Kingdom more specifically, and overlook Australia’s

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immediate neighbours in the Indo-Pacific, perhaps with the exception of the cognate nation of New Zealand (see Carniel 2019). Consequently, Australia’s historical imagining of itself as Europe-in-exile has exacerbated ideas of cultural difference between it and its geographical region. Although relations are generally amiable and productive, Australia would never, in the words of the former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, be considered ‘family’ (quoted in Dalrymple 2003, p. 211). Thus, even in a place of geographical closeness, Australia is held at a distance. Although desire for the European ‘homeland’ has shaped Australian national psychology, Philomena Murray (2007, p. 263) points out that, conversely, ‘Australia has not always been at the forefront of British or European thoughts.’ Murray (2018) characterises this as a mutual disregard as both Australia and Europe (specifically, in this context, the European Union) have had other priorities for much of the late twentieth century; Australian foreign policy in this period was particularly focused upon the United States while the EU was frequently preoccupied with its internal relations. Although the US remains an important strategic alliance, Australia’s foreign policy has shifted to maximise the potential of its geopolitical position as an ostensibly western nation in the Indo-Pacific rather than to lament its distance from imagined cultural and political homelands. Interestingly, this shift towards the Indo-Pacific has worked to increase the strategic potential of Australia–EU relations; both Murray (2018) and Andrea Benvenuti (2018) see Australia and the EU’s mutual interests in the Asian region as an opportunity for deeper engagement and commitment with one another rather than competition or disconnection. The proposed Eurovision Asia Song Contest thus provides an opportunity for both Australia and the European Broadcasting Union (as an agent of European communications industry and culture) to engage culturally and economically within the Indo-Pacific region. Some commentators suggest that Australian involvement in Eurovision has been less about European–Australian relations than it has been about leveraging a known brand for the development of more localised regional interests. Following Jessica Mauboy’s lacklustre results in Lisbon 2018, it was suggested by some that this was a sign of souring relations with the European public and that Australia would be better served by concentrating upon its Indo-Pacific chapter instead (Lo 2018; Holden 2018). The prospect of being on the ground-level of an event of this scale and with the kind of diplomatic and economic opportunities offered by the

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Eurovision tradition is undoubtedly appealing to Australian policy-makers and creative industries. It will come with its challenges, not least of which is the potential for the event—and Australia’s role within it—to be interpreted as a form of European neo-colonialism or cultural imperialism in the age of globalisation. Examining Australia’s experiences of branding and diplomacy at the original Eurovision contest may thus be useful for strategising around the potential of Eurovision Asia as a soft diplomatic tool within the Indo-Pacific region. Nation Branding at Eurovision: Postcards and Performances Nation branding has emerged as an accepted part of scholarly Eurovision commentary both in terms of the scholarship itself (see, for example, Gauja 2019; Jordan 2014; Baker 2008) and participating countries’ actual attitudes and approaches towards the Song Contest. Each country’s performance can be understood as a covert form of nation branding. It is both an important role for the Contest and, as Sweden’s 2013 interval act, ‘Swedish Smörgåsbord’ (and, to a lesser extent, ‘Love Love Peace Peace’ at Stockholm 2016) demonstrated, an element that can easily become laughable. This performance takes a deliberate poke at the nation branding elements of the Contest as host Petra Mede leads a song and dance routine featuring a range of Swedish stereotypes, including an obsessive devotion to recycling and, famously, both dancing meatballs and the first of many same-sex kisses on the Eurovision stage (Carniel 2015). The Song Contest is characterised rather aptly as a ‘chance to host a show you can’t afford’ but also an opportunity to ‘sell your country through song and dance’, which Sweden proceeded to do in the act with a knowing smile and with great effect; Sweden reportedly recouped almost 95% of its 19 million euro Eurovision expenditure through tourism after Malmö 2013 (Dean 2016). Keith Dinnie (2015, p. 5) defines the nation brand as ‘the unique, multidimensional blend of elements that provide the nation with cultural grounded differentiation and relevance for all of its target audiences.’ This definition, Dinnie argues, acknowledges the nation brand as a multifaceted thing while also recognising the role of perception and the plurality of audiences. The purpose of nation branding is typically to promote foreign consumption of the nation through tourism, foreign investments, and export industries. Accordingly, the target audiences for nation branding activities are foreign to that nation and potentially quite diverse. Nevertheless, nation branding has implications for the internal

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politics and identity of a nation. As Paul Jordan (2014, p. 24) asserts, ‘it is a practice which has the capacity to illuminate the more salient narratives of national identity and, in some cases, reflects the nationalist rhetoric of politicians.’ As nation branding is in effect a commercial practice performed largely by consultancy agencies (Jordan 2014, pp. 22–24), it intersects public and private stakeholder interests. Yet, as Dinnie (2015, p. 5) emphasises, ‘nations do not belong to brand managers or corporations… if they ‘belong’ to anyone, it is to the nation’s entire citizenry.’ While nation branding can result in economic growth that in turn will benefit this citizenry, nation brands often promote an image of the nation that is incongruous with the realities of living in that nation. For example, a campaign that presented India as a rising superpower necessarily overlooked the abject poverty experienced by a large portion of its populace (Jordan 2014, p. 25). The ethics of representation and misrepresentation are important to the nation branding project, even in as much to mitigate negative domestic responses, but, as Per Ståhlberg and Göran Bolin (2016, p. 280) remind us, the citizen is not the target audience in most branding exercises. As a result, they often emerge as the Other for consumption by the foreign audience rather than as authentic self-representation. By the parameters presented above, nation branding at the ESC is primarily the domain and concern of the host nation. Although the Contest is an opportunity for national display and promotion on an international stage for all participants, the average Eurovision delegation is not waging the same branding campaign as the host nation—or at least, not at the same level nor with the same resources. Nevertheless, they are acutely aware that, for all intents and purposes, they are the image of their own nation at the Contest and its various promotional activities. This is amplified by the level of media scrutiny involved as well as the interactions that the delegations can and do have with official instruments of their nation-state, such as embassies and governmental endorsements. Nation branding in a context like Eurovision is also complicated by the fact that each nation’s domestic audiences are also consuming the projected image. This means that those constructing the image must also incorporate an inward-looking aspect in its idea of the nation. One of the industries that most engages with and benefits from nation branding is tourism. The event itself is a major tourist attraction that can bring millions of euro into the host country. In addition to the influx of tourism that occurs with hosting the Contest, the televised nature of the

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event means that production elements can be leveraged to attract viewers as tourists at a later date. The postcards—the short video sequences that precede each song—are a valuable platform for this. According to Philip V. Bohlman (2013, pp. 35–36), ‘the Eurovision postcard connects the local to the global,’ providing a bridge between the audience and the host. Importantly, ‘each postcard welcomes visitors as foreigners about to be embraced by the host country, its people, and, above all, its music’ (Bohlman 2013, p. 35). Each host broadcaster approaches the postcards differently. A traditional approach centres upon creative presentations of the performing country’s flag, while more recent postcards feature the artist themselves, and sometimes their own culture or country, in various ways. Another common approach is to use these clips as a means of promoting the host country and its culture, often with a focus on its appeal as a tourist destination. The emphasis deployed in each year’s postcards are useful for indicating what role the host country (or at least their public broadcaster) sees the Song Contest as playing. A focus on the self is a clear branding exercise, whether it is directed at tourism, as seen in Baku 2012, or on a particular national image, such at Düsseldorf 2011, while a focus on others or guests emphasises an ethos of cultural relations that can be equally self-serving. Those centred on promoting national culture in a broad sense will still feature scenes of picturesque locales or interesting cultural events, even if tourism promotion is not their overt goal, often seeking to deepen or even challenge viewers’ understandings of the host country’s culture and language. Moscow 2009 is an example of a hybrid approach. These used urban animated sequences to introduce each upcoming country, albeit rather cryptically at times, but punctuated each postcard with Russian words for their viewers to learn, many of which would be useful for travellers. Düsseldorf 2011 was also an interesting variation. While the postcards collectively provided a ‘tour’ of German locales, it did so through the eyes of locals who were also migrants from each upcoming country. Vuletic (2018, p. 183) suggests that the approach sought to mitigate increasing concerns about German dominance in the EU, particularly during the financial crisis, by demonstrating that ‘Germany was an accepting and generous place for all Europeans.’ These postcards still utilised ideas of leisure and mobility, but did so through the lens of everyday life in Germany (Bohlman 2013, p. 35); its primary focus was upon promoting an image of multicultural Germany not as a tourist destination but as a place to live and work.

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By contrast, the following year in Baku exemplifies the postcard-as-tourism-promotion approach; the lushly filmed clips showcased the sites and scenes of modern Azerbaijan to both promote a national self-image and an attractive tourist destination. Levels of tourism during the Eurovision week itself were lower than projected (Ismayilov 2012, p. 836), perhaps inhibited by the international spotlight being shone on Azeri human rights and LGBT issues (Gluhovic 2013). As Murad Ismayilov (2012, p. 835) points out, Azerbaijan had hosted large-scale international sports and cultural events previously, but the ESC was identified as an opportunity to attract a more diverse audience than previously, and was actively leveraged as a nation branding opportunity with the specific goal of constructing Azerbaijan as a modern, European state (Carniel 2015). In recent years, postcards seeking to promote tourism often position the performing artist as enthusiastic tourist, as can be seen in Vienna 2015 and Lisbon 2018. On rare occasions, postcards may place greater emphasis on the artist or their country rather than the host nation. Revitalising the postcard tradition that focuses on presenting flags creatively, Oslo 2014 featured the performers photographing their flags in creative ways, often in locations external to the host. Malmö 2013 centred upon the artist as a performer in their own country and their preparations for Eurovision, while Stockholm 2016 featured artists enjoying their favourite leisure activities in their own countries, with a similar approach being taken in Kyiv 2017. (Not incidentally, these Contests were both produced by Swedish television producer Christer Björkman who has taken a dominant role in the Contest’s production and design in recent years.) In these approaches, the host country involves themselves in the branding of their guests, but not without reciprocal benefits. In the absence of overt nation branding, such postcards work covertly to create an image of the nation as a generous host unconcerned with their own image. Postcards can also be used to emphasise cultural relations between the host country and that of the performing artist. In another Swedish example that arguably foreshadows the Düsseldorf postcards discussed above, Stockholm 2000 featured clips illustrating how elements of guests’ cultures and industries played an important part in contemporary Swedish life, such as Dutch researchers working in a prominent Swedish lab, an Israeli author popular with Swedish readers, and the importance of Norwegian oil in Swedish transport and industry amongst other, occasionally tenuous, connections.

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Those postcards focusing on the artist or the guest country are also useful for revealing host perceptions of the guest. With the exception of Lisbon 2018, which took the approach of artist as enthusiastic cultural tourist, Australian postcards have gestured towards an image of Australianness defined by beach culture and distance. Isaiah Firebrace’s postcard from Kyiv 2017, for example, depicts him waking early to drive a long distance between his rural hometown and the nearby metropolis to perform, and later shows him in a plane, travelling once more. Dami Im’s Stockholm 2016 postcard features her both at an aquarium and at a beach. Guy Sebastian’s Vienna 2015 postcard is in many ways the most interesting. In this series, each artist receives a package in the mail that transports them to Austria, where they are met by hosts who take them to an attraction or activity: Sebastian is taken surfing. Australia itself has played with these kinds of images of beach culture in its Copenhagen 2014 interval act at the second semi-final. Jessica Mauboy’s performance of ‘Sea of Flags’ is preceded by a comic dance skit featuring stereotypes of Australian culture, from surfers to Australian football players, from singlet-wearing beer-drinkers to drag queens (in a nod to both the global success of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the queer appeal of the Song Contest itself), and, of course, koalas, kangaroos, and sharks. Like ‘Swedish Smörgåsbord’, it pokes fun at nation branding and the shorthand approach to national representation that nations must take in the three minutes they have on the Eurovision stage. Since this first non-competitive appearance at Copenhagen 2014, and with recognition of the sincerity of Mauboy’s performance there in comparison to the skits that preceded her, Australian acts generally embrace the revitalised trend in the earnest pursuit of high quality music over novelty. Australian performances at the ESC have contributed to the construction of a national brand that is young, creative, and, most importantly, ethnically diverse—albeit with a strong Asian and Indigenous focus. Indeed, in the context of Eurovision, an image of postcolonial, queer-friendly multiculturalism is a crowd-pleasing and positive modern identity to project. While this self-branding and the imposed nation branding of the hosts’ postcards do not contradict each other in any significant way, they nevertheless illustrate how Australia wishes to be perceived globally (postcolonial, multicultural, and inclusive) and how it is perceived (a distant beach culture).

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Cultural Relations at Eurovision: Fans as Agents of Vernacular Internationalism Eurovision fans embody and perform the nation in a variety of ways, both intentionally and inadvertently, and their interactions with one another work to inform micro-perceptions of different nationalities. Ismayilov (2012) identifies the embodied cultural encounter of tourists and locals as one of the most significant opportunities offered to Azerbaijan and its populace by the ESC. Baku 2012, he argues, was an opportunity for Azeri to engage in a ‘self-assessment exercise’ of the national Self and the Western Other, and for Western visitors to challenge views of Azerbaijan shaped by legacies of Orientalism (Ismayilov 2012, pp. 835, 837). As Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2004, p. 1) observe in relation to mobility and tourism, ‘Tourism also concerns the relational mobilisations of memories and performances, gendered and racialised bodies, emotions and atmospheres.’ Read together with Fricker and Gluhovic’s (2013, p. 3) characterisation of Eurovision as a ‘symbolic contact zone’ and Ismayilov’s projections for the outcomes of Baku 2012, it is evident that fans, their behaviour, and their interactions with one another and the host culture play an important part in the cultural relations of Eurovision. Cultural relations occur largely amongst non-state actors and, importantly, can occur readily at a vernacular or popular level, such as in the interactions of tourists and audiences. I draw here on David Lowe’s idea of ‘vernacular internationalism’, a concept he developed to describe ‘community-minded Australians involved in assisting with the welcomes, accommodation, excursions and general welfare of international students’ (Lowe 2015, p. 449), but I adjust this to allow for the messiness of human-to-human interactions, and to consider also interactions between guests, in addition to the host-guest relation implicit in his definition. My vernacular internationalism is thus informed by ideas of vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha 1996; Werbner 2006), pop cosmopolitanism (Jenkins 2006), and everyday multiculturalism (Wise and Velayutham 2009), as these account for both the imperfections of social relations and the role that popular culture can play in facilitating these. Nevertheless, the phrasing of Lowe’s concept is arguably more useful for conceptualising these interactions within an international relations framework. Even as fandom offers a collective and transnational subcultural identification (Chin and Morimoto 2013), Eurovision is, above all, a

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contest of nations, even though it espouses an ethos of unity. Fans are thus placed into a nationalistic space. They are, of course, not restricted to supporting their home country. Indeed, many within the international community of ‘Eurofans’ often espouse a preference for transnational fluidity over parochialism, valuing the Contest as a site of cultural exchange rather than the national competition that it ostensibly is. Despite their personal motivations, fans are nevertheless marked as national representatives through appearance, accent, and, more overtly, presence of flags or costumes to indicate national origin. Even if fans do not belong to the nation whose insignia they are wearing, their behaviour while doing so will nevertheless influence perceptions of that nation. At the 2017 Contest in Kyiv, a man with an Australian flag tied around his neck jumped on to the stage while the previous year’s winner Jamala was performing, lowered his pants, and waggled his bared backside to the audiences and cameras. Although the stage invader was later revealed to be Ukrainian journalist and serial prankster Vitalii Sediuk (notorious elsewhere for ‘pranks’ on celebrities Kim KardashianWest, America Ferrara, Gigi Hadid, Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith that were all disturbingly akin to sexual assault and harassment), the presence of the Australian flag immediately suggested that he was an Australian and viewers reacted accordingly. Prior to this revelation, many European viewers regarded the stage invasion as another example of how Australia’s presence ruins the Contest, citing it as reason to exclude Australia from participation once and for all. Australian responses were varied. Some were amused by Sediuk’s antics, even claiming such an act as typical of Australian larrikinism, but others were apologetic, seeking to mitigate the damage to Australia’s national reputation. Alistair Birch, an Australian journalist and prominent fan attending the event as part of the press corps, issued an apology to Jamala on behalf of all Australian fans during the subsequent press conference. Sediuk later confirmed that there was no nefarious intention toward Australians intended by using the flag. He had simply been chatting to some Australians in the audience and borrowed their flag without disclosing his true intentions. Ironically, Sediuk’s account of the events works in favour of the international image of Australians as affable, friendly, and accommodating, but the fact that Australians and Europeans alike were previously equally ready to believe that such an act was typically Australian indicates a far more ambiguous image of Australians abroad.

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Diplomacy at Eurovision: Artist-Ambassadors The great myth of the Song Contest is that it unites Europe; political opponents set aside their difference to enjoy a night of song. After all, one might say, artists are not politicians. The EBU prohibits political statements in the Contest’s songs and performances, yet the very act of regulating this acknowledges the political nature of the Contest. The reality is that politics have never been far from the Contest. It has been boycotted and tied to revolutions and internal politics. Artists have been barred from entering a country and songs have courted controversy for the fine line they tread to the politics rule. Unable to be played out overtly on the stage, political messages ooze out the sides of the Contest, manifesting at press conferences and subsidiary events. Furthermore, the Song Contest’s purported values of unity, diversity, and tolerance are in themselves political, for all that the EBU seek to depoliticise them by positioning them within a universalist discourse. Those values have, somewhat ironically, been a divisive factor in the recent politics of the ESC. Cultural diplomacy in it strictest sense is the utilisation of culture by state actors and their agents. Cummings’ definition, however, does create room for non-state actors, such as performing artists, to play an important role in cultural exchange. Importantly, it must be acknowledged that a position viewing artists as entirely depoliticised is naive. Eurovision artists are acutely aware of the diplomatic role they have been given and will variously embrace and reject the political platform provided by the Song Contest but, as suggested above, even if they adhere to the universalist principles of the Contest, they are effectively taking a political stance. While the artists themselves develop close relationships with one another by being in close quarters for several weeks of tours, rehearsals, and performances, they also engage in a range interactions for the media that are almost invariably framed in terms of a meeting between cultures rather than a meeting between two artists. In the context of Eurovision, all acts are political and all interactions must be framed in terms of diplomatic relations. Early in May 2018, Australian online media outlet New Matilda published an open letter from various writers, academics, and activists of Indigenous, Jewish, and Palestinian backgrounds. Titled ‘Don’t paint over oppression with hearts and rainbows,’ the letter expresses disappointment at Jessica Mauboy’s Instagram announcement that she would

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be performing in Israel during the pre-Contest tour of Europe she was participating in alongside several other artists in that year’s competition (Brull et al. 2018). They identify a shared history of settler colonialism in Australia and Palestine, decrying the tour as a ‘propaganda festival’ and Mauboy’s appearance within this as a particular ‘coup’. The letter then outlines Israeli atrocities in the conflict, concluding: ‘The world is increasingly turning on Israel, because of its apartheid and brutality. And this, Jessica Mauboy, is when you show up. This is the regime you are performing on behalf of, that you are uncritically supporting. That is the truth behind your hashtag, #iheartyou #israel.’ These criticisms were relatively mild, tempered by praise for Mauboy’s importance to Indigenous Australian representation, in comparison to other public responses. For example, in one response on her social media pages, Mauboy was called a ‘fucking terrorist supporter’. By contrast, the Anti-Defamation Commission, a Jewish Australian civil rights organisation, spoke up in Mauboy’s defence, praising her for ‘standing up to pure hatred and for using her talents to promote peace and tolerance in the Middle East’ (quoted in Johnson and Levy 2018). Both perspectives highlight the public perception and role of the Eurovision artist as ambassador. What they disagree upon is what that ambassador ought to stand for and represent in the international sphere due to divergent positions on the foreign context. With the victory of Netta Barzilai for Israel in 2018, the question of a Eurovision boycott is again on the table. In another open letter, various international artists wrote in support of a plea by Palestinian artists that the 2019 Contest be boycotted and exhorting the EBU to shift hosting duties to ‘another country with a better human rights record’ (Guardian 2018). When questioned at a Senate Estimates hearing about whether SBS would be broadcasting the Contest, former Managing Director Ebeid responded, ‘The whole point of Eurovision is to forget politics, forget all of that and unite communities and countries together in the spirit of song, in the spirit of celebration, in the spirit of culture. It transcends things you’re talking about…I can’t imagine that we would not televise Eurovision next year’ (quoted in Knox 2018). The ESC is a strange beast in this regard as public broadcasters, such as SBS, may be tied to the governmental system via funding. SBS and many other publicly funded broadcasters have hybridised to adapt to new the neo-liberal broadcasting climate; although it still receives government funding, since the 1990s it has also been required to obtain the balance of its funding

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from advertising and corporate sponsorship. Furthermore, although publicly funded and constituted via Australian legislation, both SBS and the ABC have resisted being seen exclusively as mouthpieces for government policy. Nevertheless, because they are government-funded bodies, their actions may be viewed in a distinctly political light, particularly at a fraught event like the ESC. Although Australia’s Eurovision entries to date have been supported financially by an industry partner, Sony BMG, the artist appears as a representative of their country, not their record label, so their presence will be tied to their nation’s politics, whether they will it or not. Ebeid’s response at the Senate hearing was thus diplomatic, but oddly naive. Israel 2019 represents one of the more significant political and diplomatic challenges for all participating countries in Eurovision. While Israel is not the first nation to have its human rights record used to criticise its suitability to host Eurovision, the Israel–Palestine conflict is arguably one of the most fraught contexts for the Contest, tied as it is to European colonisation, diaspora, and global politics (Carniel and Hay 2019). As the objections to Jessica Mauboy’s pre-Contest tour illustrate, Israel 2019 requires not just a consideration of international relations, but domestic relations within Australia’s postcolonial and multicultural society.

Conclusion The short video that aired as an introduction to Mauboy’s 2014 interval performance played out a fantasy of closing the distance between Australia and Europe by airlifting the entire Australian continent to the North Sea, not incidentally dislodging the UK (see Carniel 2017). While this fantasy of closure is perhaps troubling, it is important to remember that the artist that first steps on to the Eurovision stage as a representative of Australia (albeit not a competitor) is both Indigenous and Asian. This representation of Australia as multicultural and postcolonial has been a continuing strategy in the delegation’s Eurovision nation branding from 2014 to 2018. It works to disrupt the problematic of the European connection narrative and to develop a highly visible, global image of Australia as culturally and racially diverse, divergent from stereotypical ideas of bronzed, blonde Australianness. Yet, as the example of Jessica Mauboy’s visit to Israel in 2018 illustrates, this image of postcolonial multiculturalism comes with its own political intricacies. Within this, the European connection narrative is never overtly dismissed because

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of its strategic value in legitimising Australia’s presence, but the nation brand is leveraged to forge an identity that can also connect strategically to Australia’s geopolitical reality. For Australia, participation in the ESC has been an opportunity to re-brand itself in European eyes (and for an even broader international television audience) as diverse and creative. Despite this, European perceptions of Australia as a distant beach culture do persist in host-driven representation, such as postcards. Although the European connection narrative draws upon ideas of historical connection, the Song Contest is deployed as an opportunity to present a contemporary image of multicultural postcolonialism and to foster new international relations on shared values of twenty-first century liberal democracy. The political dimensions of the ESC cannot be escaped, even when transplanted into the new geopolitical context of the Indo-Pacific; it simply comes with new tensions, friendships, and rivalries. It is therefore more fruitful to embrace and even maximise its political potential within the intersecting fields of cultural relations and cultural diplomacy with both realism and optimism.

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CHAPTER 9

‘If Love Was a Crime, We Would Be Criminals’: The Eurovision Song Contest and the Queer International Politics of Flags Catherine Baker

The flag is a basic unit of meaning in the grammar of international politics. Flags on their own symbolise individual states and nations, standing as a visual shorthand for the group of people who make up the nation and for the territory they are connected to, as well as the institution that exercises national sovereignty within defined territorial borders which we call ‘the state’. Flags gathered together visualise the very idea of why international politics are ‘international’: inside a sports arena or outside an international organisation’s headquarters, they symbolise the principle that the community formed there consists of distinct nations and sovereign states (Saugmann Andersen et al. 2016, p. 137). The taken-for-granted place that national flags have in everyday life for most people famously led the sociologist Michael Billig (1995) to call flags one of the most powerful instruments of ‘banal nationalism’: in C. Baker (*)  University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_9

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the contemporary world we are so used to seeing flags hanging over public buildings, given pride of place at ceremonial occasions, or displayed in stadiums, shops, windows and cars during international competitions, or decorating the scoreboard of the Eurovision Song Contest, that we rarely question why nationhood, rather than any other principle, delimits political authority over territory around the world. Eurovision, which shares much of its logic with international sports ‘mega-events’ and since the 1990s has increasingly come to resemble them organisationally (Bölin 2006, p. 197), relies on flags just as much as the Olympic Games do to create its live and broadcast atmosphere. Yet flags are at their most revealing when they are contested: that is, when their meanings or legitimacy are disputed. The politics of recognition in which flags operate means that disputes about flags are not just disputes about a coloured symbol on screen or a piece of cloth: they are disputes about the legitimacy of the group that the flag represents, that is, whether the nation or other collective represented by the flag has the right to belong in the space that the flag might be admitted to or excluded from. In 2015–2016, a series of controversies about the display of flags during Eurovision broadcasts brought the international politics of flags into the foreground. Yet these controversies did not just involve national flags but also pride flags—that is, flags representing a sexuality or a way of embodying gender around which activists have created collective communities, which in some ways resemble nations and in other ways confound logics of nationalism. Flags become contentious at Eurovision when they encroach on another structuring principle of the competition, the determination of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to make the contest it organises a supposedly non-political space. Eurovision’s rules prohibit ‘lyrics, speeches [and] gestures of a political, commercial or similar nature’, and also prevent ‘messages promoting any organization, institution, political cause or other company, brand, products or services’ across all the host city’s Eurovision venues (EBU 2019). This protects the contest and its sponsors from ‘ambush marketing’, but also constrains performers making it a platform for activism (the 2017 Portuguese contestant Salvador Sobral, for instance, wore an ‘SOS Refugees’ sweatshirt to some press conferences until the EBU asked him to stop the day before the grand final [Honciuc 2017]). And yet the boundaries of what is and is not political are regularly tested when broadcasters choose songs with historical, social, economic or environmental themes (the French entry in

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2018 commemorated the refugee rescue boat SOS Aquarius; Swedish Television [SVT] incorporated a sombre reflection on the refugee crisis into one 2016 semi-final when it commissioned an interpretive dance act, ‘The Grey People’, for the interval). In practice, the rule unambiguously catches references to political leaders, with Ukraine’s 2005 host entry (an Orange Revolution anthem) having to remove lines about President Viktor Yushchenko, and Georgia’s 2009 entry, after the 2008 Russian–Georgian War, being disqualified altogether for its title’s thinly-veiled pun, ‘We Don’t Wanna Put In’. Commemorations of genocide and mass violence, meanwhile, have been allowed (Ukraine’s 2016 winning entry, ‘1944’, commemorated Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars while clearly paralleling Russia’s annexation of Crimea; Armenia’s 2015 entry ‘Face the Shadow’, marking the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, was originally titled ‘Don’t Deny’ (Fornäs 2017, p. 188)) even though they can be the subject of divided memories between different competitor states. Here, the EBU is in a similar position to the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) when asked to determine whether British remembrance poppies are unacceptably ‘political’ on national teams’ shirts (see Åhäll 2018): commemorations which have been normalised and made to seem non-political in one nation may be contentious or directly clashing in another member nation which the organisation ought to treat equally. Moreover, the process of making songs ‘political’ does not stop with creators or organisers: viewers too can project political meanings on to songs using their contextual knowledge, such as hearing the chorus of Poli Genova’s 2016 Bulgarian entry (‘If love was a crime, we would be criminals’) as ‘lyrics […] aimed at Russia’s anti-gay laws’ (Hart 2017). These ambiguities in determining whether or not something is ‘political’ apply not just to songs but also to flags. Examining those flags that could count on support when challenged and those that could not exposes struggles over how the EBU, local organisers, and fans understood the boundaries of what is ‘political’ in international competition, and reveals that Eurovision’s supposedly transnational public sphere was still on a deeper level structured around nation-states.

National Flags and Pride Flags in International Politics The history of the flag in international politics is, in fact, the history of nationalism itself. Mapping dynastic regimes’ denoting of ownership through flags and emblems on to the principle of popular sovereignty,

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national movements from the French, American and Haitian Revolutions onwards created flags that signalled a break from the old regime, and/or revived past kingdoms’ and rulers’ flags as evidence of their nation’s historical longevity and right to sovereignty (Hobsbawm 1983, pp. 11–12). Among the ways of binding people into national communities that one might call ‘technologies of nationalism’ (Confino and Skaria 2002, p. 8), flags have a ceremonial and ritual significance which can amount to sanctity, and are ubiquitous enough to seem normal in everyday life (Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler 2002, p. 334). They can simultaneously signal exclusion rather than inclusion to ethnic, racial and sexual minorities whose right to belong in the nation has been made insecure (Ahmed 2004, p. 130). Internationally, flags make the nation distinguishable from others, and even before ‘nation-branding’ became a commercial art in the 1990s–2000s (with Eurovision a major vehicle for it [Jordan 2014]), certain nations’ flags were among the world’s most powerful brand images (Jansen 2008, p. 122). Flags are, as Eric Hobsbawm (1992, p. 72) wrote, ‘the universal […] symbol of modern nations’, even more so than that other technology of nationalism, the anthem (see Kelen 2014): some nations (including England) have existed as cultural and political communities for centuries without an officially-­ defined anthem, but it is hard to imagine a contemporary nation even being taken seriously if it declared itself without proclaiming a flag. National flags are not, however, the only flags that matter in international politics—or in Eurovision. Other bodies and collectives also use flags to denote their own identities, visualise their identities using the same forms of graphical communication and design as national flags, and inspire the sentiments of loyalty, identification and belonging that nationhood is thought to evoke—or rather, people and organisations design and display flags hoping the community they are addressing will take them up. One clearly significant set of flags in international politics belong to international organisations. The ‘European flag’ with twelve gold stars on a blue background, adopted by the Council of Europe (CoE) in 1955 and the European Parliament in 1983, became the official flag of the then European Community (EC) in 1985, with both institutional and symbolic meanings (even though the common notion that its twelve stars match the EC’s twelve member states in 1985 is a mistaken analogy with the US flag: the CoE chose twelve stars ‘to signify perfection and harmony’ [Fornäs 2012, p. 118]). Today’s European Union (EU) describes the flag as standing for the

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EU and ‘more broadly, the identity and unity of Europe’ (European Union 2019). Twelve bright stars on a dark blue background were also the logo of the EBU’s ‘Eurovision Network’ until 1993 (Vuletic 2018, p. 150). The ‘European’ flag’s iconicity could well persuade viewers noticing the old Eurovision logo that the EBU and EU were connected. The EU has certainly done much to associate the flag with wider notions of ‘European culture’ (Kaelberer 2004, p. 170). But the relationship between the two organisations and the EU flag is more complicated: as Dean Vuletic (2018, pp. 32–33) shows, the EBU selected the twelve-star logo first, adopting it for the Eurovision Network one year before the CoE. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) designer who created the Eurovision Network logo had apparently been inspired by CoE proposals. Once the EC/EU started identifying the European flag with European political integration (on which the governments of EBU members had very different stances), however, the EBU stepped away from it: its 1993 logo with three V-shaped brush-strokes in different blue colours around a gold ring resisted identification with the EU project even as Eurovision, bringing in former state socialist countries, was starting an enlargement of its own. Another category of flag in international politics, the pride flag, has been propagated by activists seeking to signify communities with a common culture and heritage, a demand for recognition and a need for emancipation, but defined by sexual and gender-variant identities rather than national or ethnic belonging. The original Pride flag, with horizontal stripes in rainbow colours, was created in 1978 by the San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker and by the mid-1990s had overtaken the pink triangle of gay liberation (a reclamation of the symbol forced on homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps) as an international symbol of the LGBTQ rights movement (Chinn 2012, p. 124). Since the late 1990s, designers seeking greater recognition for specific sexual orientations or relationships to gender identity—especially identities that cisgender (non-transgender) gay and lesbian activism had marginalised—have adapted the rainbow flag’s visual grammar by using horizontal fields of colour in combinations that often connote a message about the identity they represent, e.g. by playing on the gendered meanings of blue and pink. The bisexual pride flag, designed by a bi US man, Michael Page, in 1998, uses pink, lavender and blue bands in a 2:1:2 ratio to suggest attraction to multiple genders but also the ways that bi people blend invisibly (not necessarily by choice) into queer and straight social worlds

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(Madison 2018, pp. 150–151). The trans pride flag, with bands of light blue, pink, white, pink and light blue, was designed in 1999 by a trans woman and US Navy veteran, Monica Helms (Ramirez and Sterzing 2017, p. 72). Queer activists of colour have meanwhile added black and brown stripes to the rainbow flag to symbolise commitment to fighting for queer liberation and racial justice at once (Klapeer and Laskar 2018, p. 536). These innovations, and the very idea of the pride flag, are North American, but since the 1990s have circulated transnationally through digital queer cultures, which have often borrowed language and iconography from Anglophone movements, making other pride flags besides the rainbow flag increasingly common sights at European Prides (and elsewhere). Pride flags, especially the rainbow flag, have thus become significant symbols in international politics themselves. Activist movements have used them to demand equal rights from states and to protest against police repression, using massed flags’ visual spectacle to stake a symbolic claim for visibility (Ammaturo 2016); advertisers and tourist boards have used the rainbow flag in marketing to those LGBTQ travellers they believe have high disposable income, especially middle-class gay men (Bell and Binnie 2004); in the 2000s when the EU expected accession candidates’ governments to allow and secure Pride marches as evidence they were making the necessary progress on human rights, photographs of well-attended Pride marches with many rainbow flags became a quick visual shorthand for how well they were doing (see Bilić 2016). Anti-LGBTQ movements and regimes, too, have recognised the rainbow flag as identity symbol and political claim, and the Russian parliament’s controversial law in 2013 against promoting ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ (that is, diverse sexualities and gender non-conformity) to under-18s—a move with immediate repercussions for the politics of Eurovision (Baker 2017, pp. 107–110)—extends in police practice to the rainbow flag (Suchland 2018, p. 2). States in the late 2000s and 2010s wishing to suggest their nation stood out from others in its progress on LGBTQ rights lit up state buildings in rainbow colours, flew them over diplomatic missions, let LGBTQ troops march under it at Pride, and (in 2017–2018 Sweden) even used it in advertising to suggest sexual freedom and gender diversity were part of what the national military existed to defend (Strand and Kehl 2018). As the rainbow flag and other pride flags have rippled out from the US to become ‘a visible manifestation of transnational ways of queer being […] and belonging’ (Klapeer and

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Laskar 2018, p. 524), they have simultaneously become contentious political symbols. National, international and pride flags, and their colours, are all therefore politicised objects in international relations. All purport to represent a community of people with a collective identity based on shared culture, history and heritage—the ‘common myths and memories’ (Smith 1991, p. 40) which must be reproduced and reperformed to sustain national identity. The logic of the pride flag translates this mode of symbolic collective identification on to a community which does not perpetuate itself through biological reproduction (rather, its members must find out about and join the community anew every generation) and does not claim state-like sovereignty over territory—though it often ties itself to small autonomous spaces it has had to defend against surveillance, moralising and violence from the state. In this respect, pride flags queer the concept of the nation. Yet what all three forms of flags have in common is that they exist in a field of struggle about whether the groups they refer to have the right to be represented in the spaces they have entered—that is, whether the identity and political community they stand for is going to be recognised. Flags, in fact, raise questions of recognition on two levels. Newer pride flags can suffer from a literal problem of recognition in that their associations are not as widely known as the rainbow flag, even to some individuals they might hail, let alone the wider public (Hartman 2013, p. 51). Flags of small states, or states whose flags are easily confused (an endemic difficulty for Slovakia and Slovenia, in Eurovision and elsewhere [Bajt 2017, p. 28]), suffer a similar recognition problem. On a deeper level, flags in international politics are the subjects of struggles about political recognition: whether the entities and communities they represent have fulfilled the criteria for acceptance into the ‘world of nations’ (Billig 1995, p. 6) on the same terms as those which have already been confirmed to belong. Though international law lays down criteria for statehood, the foreign policy of other governments and international organisations determines how they apply these criteria to entities demanding recognition as states (Caspersen 2015, p. 393). Such negotiations can even involve struggles over flags themselves: the peace implementation process in Bosnia–Herzegovina and the pre-independence process in Kosovo left both countries with flags based on the EU flag’s iconography, avoiding historic symbols that could imply a certain ethnic group could claim the country as its nation-state

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(Kolstø 2006, pp. 680–685; Obućina 2011, p. 35). In theoretical terms, the legitimacy of a state in search of recognition is produced between the entity which claims it and the other states and bodies which accept or reject their claim—as is the legitimacy of LGBTQ minorities’ claims to be ‘rights-bearing subjects’ in Western liberal democratic logic (Sabsay 2016, p. 102). The intersubjective nature of identity and identification, where ‘[i]dentities […] are acquired, claimed and allocated within power relations’ (Jenkins 2014, p. 47) through identity claims and through reactions to them, therefore does not just explain the social identities of individuals – it also explains the international social identities of nations and states. This was exemplified by several linked struggles over flags at Eurovision in 2015 and 2016.

Eurovision and the Backstage Politics of Flags Eurovision, like the sports tournaments Michael Billig (1995) describes, is structured on a logic of ‘banal nationalism’, where much of the meaning and pleasure spectators make from its performances comes from the spectacle of nation competing against nation. Whether a Eurovision entry performs a globalised and ‘Western’ popular music genre or showcases music, dance, language or costume that it offers up as national tradition, the structure of Eurovision invites the audience to understand that that nation is accomplished in them; even entries that remediate national folklore simultaneously convey the subject position of a ‘self-exoticising’ entrepreneur adapting to what the Western/European gaze expects of their peripheralised nation (see Baker 2008). Indeed, Eurovision 2016 famously parodied this dynamic in Måns Zelmerlöw and Petra Mede’s interval act, ‘Love Love Peace Peace’. Semiotically, the international competitive structure of Eurovision invites a spectatorial ‘gaze’ (or way of seeing) in which all performers embody their nations, and their embodied performances draw meaning from how they harness or subvert audience expectations about gender, nation, ethnicity, sexuality and race (see Kestnbaum 1993). The logic of performers embodying their nations is most concrete when performers wear outfits purporting to be national folk costumes (whether to claim authenticity, as when six grandmothers from the Udmurt folk ensemble Buranovskiye Babushki represented Russia in 2012, or to be ostensibly parodic, as with the female dancers supporting Donatan and Cleo’s ‘My Słowanie (We Are Slavic)’ for Poland in 2014), but also encompasses a

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much wider range of recognisably ‘national’ masculinities and femininities: most recent male Italian entrants, for instance, have worn sharp retro-styled suits and haircuts harking back to the iconic Italian men’s fashion of the 1950s and 1960s. Because much Eurovision research is devoted to critical analysis of performances and broadcasts, the aspect of embodied performance is probably the domain through which Eurovision’s structuring logic of nationalism has been most researched (see, e.g., Sieg 2013a, b). Yet its backstage politics and economics also deserve attention, and among these are the politics of flags. The backstage politics of flags at Eurovision are, of course, to do with which flags, in which ways, should (not) be on the broadcast that constitutes Eurovision’s expanded stage. Symbolically, flags denote people, objects and places as belonging to the nation they represent (Kolstø 2006), so it is logical that Eurovision’s visual culture makes them play many roles. Besides references to national flags designed into some individual performances, flags have been built into the ritual structure of Eurovision through on-screen banners when telephone voting numbers are displayed, and through the convention of the ‘postcard’ (Bohlman 2013, pp. 35–36). These clips, filmed either in the host country or performers’ own countries, are vignettes of national and local culture and typically end on an image reworking symbols and colours from performers’ national flags. Eurovision winners echo athletic victory laps by taking their national flags on stage, and in 1999 (recognising the Kosovo War, which was then taking place) all the contestants in the Jerusalem contest reunited on stage after the victor’s reprise to wave their national flags and sing Israel’s famous Eurovision winner ‘Hallelujah’ as a performance of peace. Green-room sequences are filled with flags held by performers and fellow delegation members when the camera pans past (Lam 2018, p. 121). When SVT organised Eurovision 2013 in Malmö, one of several innovations it appeared to borrow from the London 2012 Olympics was beginning the grand final with a flag parade where the contestants crossed the arena in performance order carrying their national flags. This provided the same kind of ‘democratising’ contrast to the heavily-criticised 2012 Baku contest (see Gluhovic 2013) that the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony had drawn between London and 2008s ‘authoritarian’ Beijing. Subsequent grand finals have retained the opening flag parade, writing it into Eurovision ritual. The heart-shaped Eurovision logo introduced in 2004, meanwhile, was designed to be fillable with every competitor’s flag, tying

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flags into the economics of Eurovision by permitting the commercial and amateur manufacture of nationally-branded merchandise. These appearances of flags on screen are almost entirely uncontested: they are within the ritual structure or permitted by it, and as competitors’ flags they necessarily belong to countries whose presence is unchallenged within Eurovision’s society of states. Historically, broadcasters could only compete in Eurovision once their states had gained international recognition and they had become full EBU members (Australia’s participation since 2015 involves a special arrangement based on its Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) being an associate member). But this consensus has had to be created by rejecting prospective members that do not recognise all Eurovision’s existing states, and the EBU has been firm that countries that ban Israeli content—like Lebanon, where the broadcaster Téle Liban got as far as selecting a song for Eurovision 2005—will not be admitted (Raykoff 2007, p. 2). Yet the EBU is not the only actor responsible for the display of flags at Eurovision. Delegations bring their own flags into the green room, and as stage props: in 2000, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) withdrew sponsorship from the band Ping Pong after they waved Syrian and Israeli flags on stage (Bohlman and Rehding 2013, p. 288), in a much less institutionally sanctioned peace demonstration than the staging of ‘Hallelujah’ in 1999. An even greater mass of flags fills the arena in live broadcasts through the agency of fans. The practical politics of flags, Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues, are a combination of ‘flag-waving from above and from below’ (Eriksen 2007, p. 9). If the flags of postcards, performances and the grand-final parade are waved ‘from above’, fans and the emotional experiences they desire to craft for themselves by waving or wearing a certain flag in the Eurovision arena constitute Eurovision’s flag-waving ‘from below’— though in between ‘above’ and ‘below’ come many different layers of negotiation between the EBU, national delegations, host broadcasters and fan clubs. Eurovision fandoms, and their identity-making practices and discourses, are another major theme of Eurovision research (see, e.g. Singleton et al. 2007; Kyriakidou et al. 2018). Eurovision organisers are curiously dependent on the fans who constitute their live audience to produce the arena-scale spectacle and the affective charge an audience of cheering fans transmits to broadcast viewers. The broadcast of a live crowd event mobilising national (and other forms of collective) sentiment in the manner of an Olympic opening ceremony or

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major sporting event, Angharad Closs Stephens suggests, invites viewers to share the togetherness of the ‘affective atmospheres’ of nationalism created in the crowd (Closs Stephens 2016, p. 181). It is fans’ flag practices in the arena which create the visuality of the atmosphere Eurovision beams into millions of domestic and social spaces, many of which (hosting Eurovision parties) will have been decorated with flag paraphernalia themselves (Sieg 2013b, p. 24). Though paying attendees, fans in the arena are, through their televised embodied practices, also part of what Eurovision broadcasts and (for advertising and sponsorship purposes) sells. Alongside national flags, Eurovision’s large LGBTQ fan base has meant that, since Eurovision expanded into arenas, one of the most visible flags in the audience has been the rainbow flag—pulling Eurovision into the international politics of queer visibility and Pride. While Eurovision’s LGBTQ (especially gay) fandom dates back to the 1970s, Eurovision’s on-screen association with queer visibility (see Baker 2017) began in the late 1990s, when its first openly gay contestant (Iceland’s Páll Óskar) competed in 1997 and Dana International, an openly trans woman, won for Israel in 1998. The string of contests held in central and east European capital cities in the 2000s, just as many of these countries were going through the EU accession process, brought many rainbow flags inside the arena but created an ongoing Western European fan discourse about whether they could be safely carried outside. Marija Šerifović’s heavily queer-coded performance in 2007 symbolically attached a ‘utopia of tolerance’ to her country, Serbia (Vänskä 2007, p. 66); at the other end of the emerging spectrum between visibility and repression in global queer politics, when Moscow hosted Eurovision in 2009, the mayor (who had been banning Pride since 2006) sent police to break up a ‘Slavic Pride’ march on the afternoon of the grand final, leading the BBC commentator Graham Norton to call the contest ‘the Beijing Olympics of Eurovision’ live on air. A circuit of controversy about the politics of hosting mega-events in regimes which repressed democratic opposition and sexual dissidence (see Gluhovic 2013) in fact wove between the Olympics and Eurovision from 2008, when Beijing hosted the Olympics and Russia won Eurovision (the reason Moscow hosted in 2009), to 2014, when the passage of Russia’s 2013 ‘gay propaganda’ law made Western LGBTQ rights campaigners call for international boycotts of the Sochi Olympics (see Edenborg 2017, pp. 130–131). While the Games were still ongoing, the Russian state provoked foreign diplomatic and public

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opinion further by sending troops into Eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea. Many fans and journalists projected a narrative of a ‘new Cold War’ between Europe and Russia, with (in)tolerance of LGBTQ visibility as one of its defining contested values, on to the Eurovision victory a few months later of the Austrian bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst. Eurovision’s incorporation into the international geopolitics of LGBTQ rights adds an extra dimension to Peter Rehberg’s observation, made almost a decade ago, that ‘Eurovision provides a rare occasion for simultaneously celebrating both queerness and national identity’ (Rehberg 2007, p. 60, emphasis original). The occasion was rare because, under patriarchal and socially conservative forms of nationalism, queerness and gender variance threaten national heteronormative and cisnormative masculinity (Mole 2011): Eurovision, in contrast, let fans celebrate sexuality and nationhood, as well as sexuality and Europeanness, together (see Sieg 2017, pp. 26–27). More such spaces for celebration emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, some even under the auspices of states that had started to perform LGBTQ-friendly national identities (though many queer activists remained cautious of states promoting their LGBTQ-friendliness, arguing states often used it to build a progressive reputation while committing other human rights violations: the term ‘pinkwashing’ (Schulman 2012, p. 135), first used in this context by the Palestinian solidarity campaign to criticise the Israeli government’s promotional strategies, thus gained wider relevance in global queer politics). The reaction, in Russia and other states where anti-LGBTQ movements and organisations have gained political power, has been for politicians and the Church to further stigmatise queerness and its symbols as contagions imported from the West or (in Russia) so-called ‘Gayropa’ (Edenborg 2017, p. 159)—as if ‘Europe’ is responsible for turning the nation’s children gay. The author of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws, Vitalii Milonov, has indeed pressured Russian broadcasters to leave Eurovision precisely so that sights like Wurst’s gendertransgressive appearance would not be transmitted as Russian family viewing (Polyakova 2014, p. 39). It was against this background that both the politics of unrecognised states and the politics of queer recognition played out in a series of controversies at Eurovision 2015 and 2016 about the display of flags.

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Rainbow Flags, Banned Flags and Other Contentions in Eurovision 2015–2016 The framing of ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’ as two sides in an ideological struggle over LGBTQ rights and visibility, and the notion that Eurovision (where Russia had competed since 1994, becoming one of its most consistent high scorers) was a site where they would inevitably come into contact, led to contention in 2015 when Polina Gagarina represented Russia at Eurovision in Vienna. As the sequel to Conchita Wurst’s win in Copenhagen, and the first contest to be without a Ukrainian entry since Ukraine had started competing (Ukraine’s broadcaster had not been able to commit financially to Eurovision 2015 because of the Russian-backed war in Donbas), Vienna readily lent itself to ‘new Cold War’-style commentary. Indeed, during the grand final where Gagarina led for much of the voting before ending second, the live audience booed so loudly that presenters had to intervene (Hay and Kanafani 2017, pp. 57–59). Gagarina, for her part, was criticised in Russian media by Milonov and others simply for posting an Instagram video of herself giving Wurst a friendly kiss (Schreck 2015), indicating that even as the structuring gaze of Eurovision made her embody the Russian nation (and, for some viewers, its government’s policies) to viewers outside Russia, some voices within Russia were rejecting her suitability for embodying that nation at all. During Gagarina’s semi-final a few days earlier, in fact, the disconnect between Russian state homophobia and Russia’s participation in a contest with special celebratory meaning to its LGBTQ fans had already been visualised in a manner which did not become so publicly controversial but may have contributed to some struggles over flags the following year. At one moment during Gagarina’s performance of ‘A Million Voices’, the camera had pulled back for one of Eurovision’s signature long arena shots and captured her framed by a mass of rainbow flags belonging to a group of fans who happened to have brought them to the semi-final. Since Eurovision arenas do not divide different countries’ supporters into separate areas, every audience shot in the live broadcast is likely to contain many flags besides those of the country currently on stage, symbolising Eurovision’s ‘unity in diversity’. The juxtaposition of so many rainbow flags around the Russian entrant, however, produced an accidentally meaningful image for the popular geopolitics of LGBTQ rights: understanding the visual grammar that flags mark

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places as belonging to the group they stand for, and knowing the context of ‘Europe’–Russia relations since 2014, allowed the image to be read as an act of defiance or resistance to homophobia, to Russia, and/ or to the cynical intentions some fans had perceived in Russia’s record of sending entries about diversity and peace. Its irony did not go unnoticed (Bryan 2015), even though its creation had depended entirely on which flags the audience in those seats happened to have brought: the same moment during the final framed Gagarina with the usual assortment of national flags instead. Viewers’ interpretations of and affective reactions to the juxtaposition of the Russian entrant and the rainbow flag exemplified the idea that, in international politics, ‘[i]mages do not speak for themselves—they are made to speak for, by and about us’ (Dauphinée 2007, p. 153, emphasis original)—and at Eurovision 2016 a ticket agency would make images of flags speak even before the contest had begun. On 28 April 2016, fans with tickets to the Globen Arena in Stockholm were surprised to be sent an ‘Official Flags Policy’ by SVT’s ticketing partner, AXS. Previous ticketers had not issued such detailed instructions, though fans might have expected tighter security measures since Eurovision would be the first politically symbolic arena concert of its kind since the November 2015 Paris attacks had targeted the national football stadium and the Bataclan concert hall. The policy regulated the size of flags and poles which could be brought to the arena, addressing the problem of large flags blocking camera sightlines that had frustrated producers for some years, but became much more controversial when it printed textual and visual lists of ‘banned’ flags, and called into question certain flags that most fans had not expected would be contentious at all (AXS 2016). The only flags ‘allowed’, under this policy, were the ‘[o]fficial national flags’ of the countries competing in Eurovision, other recent participants, and other countries provided they were UN member states (AXS 2016, p. 1). Besides these ‘allowed’ flags, the text in green also created an ambiguous category of ‘tolerated’ flags: ‘[r]ainbow flags and the European Union flag’, it stated, ‘will be tolerated provided they will, according to the evaluation of the organisers, not be used as [a] tool to intentionally make a political statement during the show’ (AXS 2016, p. 1, emphasis original). The publication of the ‘flags policy’ created several exclusions and even more ambiguities which upset a right that fans had until then taken for granted: the right to take a flag expressing their identity into the celebratory space of the live Eurovision audience, and have it take its place

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among the rest. Causing most outcry was a visual list of nine ‘banned flags’, amalgamating entities with very different statuses under international law into one category of illegitimacy. The flags shown under the text ‘The following flags are specifically not allowed at the Eurovision Song Contest’ included those of Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Basque Country, Islamic State, Crimea (both the Crimean flag used under Russian annexation and the ethnic flag of the Crimean Tatars), Palestine, the People’s Republic of Donetsk, Northern Cyprus and Transnistria (AXS 2016, p. 2, emphasis original). In several cases, the intention appeared to be to prevent unrecognised and de facto states’ flags appearing live in countries where those entities were not recognised or their flags could even be against the law. Yet the organisation of the list equated violent separatist and terrorist movements with countries many UN members had already recognised as sovereign states: Palestine, which had been recognised by the UN as a ‘non-member observer state’ in 2012 and recognised as a state by Sweden in October 2014 (Eriksson 2018); Kosovo, which had been recognised by 113 countries since unilaterally declaring independence in 2008 and been admitted to the International Olympic Committee in December 2014; and—most embarrassingly, it would turn out—the Basque Country, which has been recognised as an official nationality and Autonomous Community under the Spanish constitution since 1978. No explanation materialised for the Basque Country’s inclusion, which appeared to imply the compilers had confused the Basque Autonomous Community’s elected government with the Basque terrorist movement that had never governed the Community and had ceased operations in 2011. The textual list of banned flags also prohibited whole categories of flag that fans had not expected could even be at issue, and created alarming ambiguities for fans who were aware that security guards on the gate would be enforcing the rules. ‘Local, regional and provincial flags’ were explicitly prohibited, as were ‘flags/banners containing and/or representing a statement that the organisers consider of political or religious nature, in particular flags of disputed territories’, and (more understandably) those containing ‘statements or images that the organisers consider offensive, discriminatory or unsuitable for the public’: another line banning flags ‘containing statements in another language than English’ (even though Eurovision famously has two official languages, English and French) would strictly speaking have prohibited official

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national flags such as Brazil’s, which contains a motto in Portuguese. Sub-state national flags like Wales’s and Scotland’s also appeared to be banned, since those nations were not themselves UN member states, and (unmentioned) so presumably were ethnic flags such as those of the Sami or Roma. This policy brought Eurovision closer to crowd management at the Olympics, which in London 2012 had banned all flags except those of countries participating in the Games: however, the Eurovision draft policy went further, since London 2012 had at least allowed ‘flags of nations under the umbrella of a participating country’ and specifically named ‘England, Scotland and Wales’ (LOCOG 2012, p. 2). While the EBU rushed to clarify that the illustrations of banned flags were not EBU policy and had not been intended for publication, and promised that it understood ‘the sensitivities of presenting a selection of flags of organisations and territories, each of them of very different nature’ (EBU 2016c), outcries in mainstream media centred on national flags which had had their right to recognition undermined by being banned. The portal Wales Online, for instance, headlined its article ‘Eurovision puts Welsh dragon on list of banned flags that also includes Islamic State’ (Owen 2016). Outrage was greatest in Spain, where the national broadcaster Radio–Televisión Española (RTVE) demanded that the EBU remove ‘the flag […] that derives its legitimacy from the Statute of Guernica and the Spanish Constitution itself’ from the banned list (RTVE 2016), the government spokesperson Soraya Sáenz de Santamaria promised the foreign ministry would complain to the Swedish government, and even the prime minister Mariano Rajoy appeared to comment indirectly on the scandal by tweeting a pointedlytimed message of support to the Spanish entrant Barei (Fuster 2016). It is likely to have been this pressure, from one of the EBU’s ‘big five’ broadcasters with guaranteed places in the Eurovision grand final and with the backing of the Spanish state, that led to the EBU publishing an updated policy on 1 May with permission for flags to now include ‘the language of the host country’ as well as English (though not French), and without the illustrated examples of banned flags (EBU 2016a). As well as its strict approach to what constituted a recognised national flag, the draft policy had also created even more uncertainty over two symbols tightly connected to the ‘imagined community’ (Sandvoss 2008, p. 198) that Eurovision broadcasts create: the EU flag and the rainbow flag. Both of these, in the draft policy, were to be ‘tolerated’ as long as they were not being ‘used as [a] tool to intentionally make a political

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statement’ (AXS 2016, p. 1). ‘Tolerance’ in queer politics is scarcely full inclusion (see Petschesky 2002), and the rule would have forced security staff to make immediate, arbitrary decisions about fans’ intentions, based largely on how they interpreted the appearance and behaviour of those they searched. The EU flag, moreover, has extra politicised meanings in certain countries where (not) belonging to ‘Europe’ has become an ideological symbol: would an EU flag become political if carried by a British ‘Remain’ supporter in the then-upcoming EU membership referendum, or a veteran of the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine? The 1 May policy curtailed the ambiguity around the EU flag by placing it equally to official national flags under a green tick. The rainbow flag was also under the green tick, but unlike the EU flag, continued to be described with hedging language—which both downplayed its meaning as a symbol of LGBTQ identity and protest and avoided the EBU having to commit itself to a stance of allowing a flag with this meaning on screen. The draft policy’s ‘tolerance’ of the rainbow flag as long as it was not being intentionally used for making political statements conflicted, many queer activists would say, with the flag’s history as a collective identity symbol for people whose very right to exist as queer was always politicised already. It played into a depoliticisation of the Pride flag which left-wing and decolonial activists had already come to perceive in the institutionalisation and corporate sponsorship of big-city Prides, the inclusion of police and the military in certain countries into what had originated as a protest against state violence towards queers, and government strategies of ‘pinkwashing’ (see Bacchetta et al. 2015; Alm and Martinsson 2016; Klapeer and Laskar 2018, p. 528; Russell 2018). The shared history of resistance and protest that the rainbow flag could symbolise was not officially recognised even in the 1 May policy: this allowed ‘[t]he rainbow flag, as a symbol of tolerance and diversity’ (EBU 2016a, p. 1), with no reference to queer identities, sexual minorities or Pride. Meanwhile, the update provided no certainty at all for fans who had questioned whether pride flags besides the rainbow flag, with equivalent meaning for their own identity-based community membership, would be allowed. The flag left most ambiguous under this policy was the blue, pink and white trans flag, which had become more and more prominent in Pride marches and queer demonstrations during the 2010s—not least in protest at cisgender gay and lesbian activists’ record of failing to campaign on, or being actively hostile towards, trans interests (see Balzer and Hutta 2014).

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When asked directly about the trans flag on 1 May, however, the operator of the EBU Twitter account responded simply ‘Only flags of participating nations, other UN member states, the rainbow flag and EU flag can be waved @Eurovision this year’ (EBU 2016d). Even though Eurovision owed its most iconic performance of the decade to Conchita Wurst (who embodied gender variance through her bearded glamorous appearance, and in 2014s political context had become a symbol of trans visibility), and even though Dana International’s victory in 1998 remained a landmark in Eurovision history, the EBU’s failure to give guarantees about the trans flag when pressed suggested it did not give trans political subjects the same level of recognition it was prepared to afford to the rainbow flag. The implications of the EBU not recognising the wider family of pride flags were more than symbolic for fans who, a few weeks before the contest, were already looking forward to travelling to Stockholm, joining in the out-of-the-ordinary space that Eurovision creates in its host cities, and watching the contest live among an international crowd. Alongside the anticipated pleasures of spectatorship in the arena, fans who wanted their presence at Eurovision to feel like an embodied celebration of their trans or bi identity (or another identity with a pride flag of its own) now also had to anticipate something much more intimidating: not knowing whether security would let them into the arena with their flag. Having a flag confiscated would not only mean a financial loss (the policy stated confiscated flags and objects would not be returned), but also losing an object that might well be invested with personal significance from events where the owner had taken or worn it before. Moreover, the policy also permitted staff to remove attendees from the venue for bringing in items that breached the policy: even though this might only have been intended to cover the most extreme cases of offensive behaviour, its wording did not reassure queer and trans fans with painful past memories of being bullied by door staff on nights out that an individual guard would not turn them away for carrying a non-rainbow pride flag (and would not have staved off the potential negative publicity of such an incident being filmed on smartphones and going viral as the contest began). As Eriksen notes, flags matter most the more that the identity they represent is challenged, and the more ‘personal emotional resources’ have been invested in them (Eriksen 2007, p. 10): at a structural level, Eurovision’s organisers had not recognised the everyday insecurities of queer and, especially, trans fans.

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Despite the extent to which the Eurovision ticketing agency and then its organisers had attempted to regulate fans’ display of flags, and the sensitivity this implies there may have been about what flags might end up being broadcast on the transnational live feed, the only serious incident at Eurovision 2016 concerning a disputed flag had nothing to do with fans in the arena—rather, it involved a delegation in the green room. Potential confrontations about pride and regional flags at security had not materialised (which is not to say fans’ alarm at the possibility had been misplaced), and the EBU had meanwhile relaxed its policy to allow ‘national, regional and local’ flags of the performers’ heritage (including the Welsh and Sami flags) (Duffy 2016)—though again had not taken the opportunity to welcome the trans flag. It seemed flags need not have been a source of anxiety after all. Yet during a reprise of performances in the first semi-final on 10 May, a quick cut to the green room after the Armenian clip captured Armenia’s contestant, Iveta Mukuchyan, holding up the flag of Nagorno-Karabakh—the de facto state with an Armenian ethnic majority that is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan. The EBU described this as a ‘serious breach’ of Eurovision rules in a statement the next day, stated that it ‘consider[ed] the flag’s appearance in the transmission harmful to the Eurovision Song Contest brand’, and announced that Armenia would be sanctioned at the next Reference Group meeting (which could have led, but did not, to Armenia’s disqualification from Eurovision 2017) (EBU 2016b). One of the very flags that the first draft policy had taken most steps to exclude from the arena had appeared on screen, by means that the new rules for fans could have done nothing to prevent.

Conclusion Eurovision, with its rituals of competition between nations, exemplifies the paradox of ‘unity in diversity’ visions of Europe, where celebrating a transnational collective identity involves continued reliance on its component nation-states, while contested and diverse identifications within each nation are often compressed into one undifferentiated national whole. Struggles over national, sub-national and territorial flags can be contentious enough, but still respect a structuring principle of international politics, the link between national self-determination and state sovereignty. Eurovision’s distinctions about whether or not a flag is political turn, in practice, on whether the entity it denotes has consensus

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recognition among the international society of states. By deferring decisions on states’ legitimacy to the UN, it avoids actively ruling on the legitimacy of territories like Kosovo which some EBU members recognise and others oppose. This pragmatic stance attempts to prevent the EBU itself having to make political decisions. Yet this breaks down as soon as the EBU must rule on flags which do not stand for states or even territorial identities, where no consensus international arbiter exists. Eurovision’s compromise, defining the rainbow flag in the broad language of ‘tolerance and diversity’, does not satisfy activists who insist that queer and LGBTQ identities are political, but prevents confrontation with broadcasters who might come under domestic pressure to object if Eurovision institutionally identified the rainbow flag with LGBTQ Pride. This tension about the visibility of queer symbols and identities echoes a tension that queer people living under state homophobia must themselves negotiate in everyday life (Stella 2015, p. 128): greater visibility (however much campaigners in the West might struggle for it) often exposes queers to unwelcome attention from wider society and the state (Edenborg 2017, pp. 34–35). Often, in such circumstances, it is safer not to be so visible or so well recognised. The very question of whether Eurovision is or should be ‘political’, in fact, exists in a similar bind. Critical academics may well argue that the field of ‘the political’ should encompass every form of struggle over how power is distributed or where definitions, identities and representations are contested, since these processes always occur ‘within power relations’ (Jenkins 2014, p. 47). Nuclear disarmament, a not uncommon theme at Eurovision, is a subject of political struggle; so are pollution, unemployment, the euro crisis, war commemoration, resilience to terrorism, and the rescue of refugees. Yet if Eurovision rules accepted these themes as ‘political’, they too might become contentious: there might be more freedom of expression in Eurovision if ‘political’ remains very narrowly conceived. Eurovision’s recent controversies about the politics of flags expose the limits of determining what is and is not political in contemporary international relations, where nation-states but also movements based on intimate embodied identities seek recognition. Queer sexualities and queer embodiments of gender have become the basis of collective identities and claims for rights—and, more broadly, Cynthia Weber even argues that one of the things that makes power struggles in international politics possible is ‘the will to knowledge about sexualities’ itself (Weber 2016, p. 2,

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emphasis original). Urging International Relations scholars to conceive of a ‘queer logic of statecraft’, or ways in which subjectivities in international politics can be at once normal and perverse, Weber (2016, p. 10) organises her argument around an image taken from Eurovision, the embodied persona of Tom Neuwirth as Conchita Wurst. Yet she also emphasises that ‘queer International Relations’ must stay tied to ‘sexes, genders and sexualities’ and the bodies which refuse or fail to ‘signify monolithically’ in heteronormative and cisnormative frames (Weber 2016, p. 14 citing Sedgwick 1993, p. 8)—that is, bodies which cannot be kept to one or other side of a binary, which (like Conchita’s beard) pose questions without resolving them, and can simultaneously be both normal and perverse. Flags, with collective meanings and even more personal meanings projected on to them, do not signify monolithically either: indeed, flags’ ability to unify people with different understandings of a nation or movement into one crowd is perhaps their very power as a political symbol (Klapeer and Laskar 2018, p. 531). All flags are polysemic and thus have that ability—but a queer international politics of flags, following Weber, should take particular interest in flags’ connections to sexes, genders and sexualities, including flags representing political identities based on these but also flags that appropriate national symbols in queer ways. For movements that turn queer and trans experiences into collective political identities, flags do the same work of symbolising, visualising and mobilising a community as they do for nations (a ‘normal’ thing for flags to do in international politics)—yet they also claim that other forms of collective belonging should have rights and recognition attached, as well as forms derived from belonging to a nation-state. In Billig’s ‘world of nations’, this claim is more ‘perverse’. Without state governments to stand up for them, as the contrasting fortunes of sub-state national flags and pride flags in the ‘banned flags’ controversy show, their position is structurally much more precarious on the international stage.

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CHAPTER 10

Europe: Start Voting Now! Democracy, Participation and Diversity in the Eurovision Song Contest Anika Gauja

To viewers of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the phrase ‘Europe: Start Voting Now!’ is no doubt a familiar catchcry, marking the start of the coordinated period of the show, where audiences across Europe can vote for their favourite performance of the evening. Along with the elaborate procedures for revealing the vote, which use a substantial proportion of the Contest’s broadcast time, the performance of democracy and voting has always been at the forefront of Eurovision. In many ways this is a natural fit with Eurovision’s broader mission as a project to unite Europe, as the concept of democracy enjoys an unparalleled legitimacy as both a normative and institutional tool to build common identities, make decisions in the collective interest, foster inclusion and promote participation. Previous scholarship has charted the relationship between politics and Eurovision in terms of nation branding and national identity (see, for example, Carniel 2017; Johnson 2014; Chen 2011), the use of A. Gauja (*)  University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_10

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performers and Eurovision performances to promote a political agenda (Motschenbacher 2016), the contest as space for identity politics (Baker 2017; Carniel 2015; Aston 2013; Gluhovic 2013) and the geopolitics of bloc voting (Spierdijk and Vellekoop 2009; Ginsburgh and Noury 2008). This chapter builds on this tradition, understanding Eurovision as a political space but takes a different angle by exploring the way in which the ideals of democracy are manifest in the ESC. Through an analysis of the ESC’s voting methods, I argue that the institutional characteristics of modern democracy have always been present at Eurovision, shifting over time from juries that served a quasirepresentative function, to popular participation through tele-voting. This has been a development that has mirrored the expansion of the franchise and the ‘democratisation’ of Southern and Eastern European states, the development of the European Parliament since 1979, as well as an increasing demand for direct democracy in the established European democracies. It has, however, brought to the fore many of the regional alliances that have given the contest its ‘political’ reputation. The chapter also undertakes an analysis of the ways in which participating countries choose their own acts: from highly participatory and multi-staged song festivals, to instances where the decision is made solely by the national broadcaster. This analysis in the chapter highlights some of the uneasy democratic tensions that arise in balancing demands for greater popular participation while at the same time mirroring the diversity of the competing nations. In particular, it analyses the contest between televoting as the ‘voice of the people’ and expert opinion through national juries, which has been both an emerging feature of the Song Contest and a characteristic of the populist zeitgeist that has spread over Europe in the last decade.

The Historical Development of the Eurovision Vote The rules of the ESC clearly stipulate that it is a ‘non-political event’: No lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature shall be permitted during the ESC…No messages promoting any organization, institution, political cause or other, company, brand, products or services shall be allowed in the Shows and within any official ESC premises…A breach of this rule may result in disqualification. (European Broadcasting Union 2019)

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While these conditions may apply in principle to the staging of the performances, in conceptualising the Contest as one between competing nations, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has necessarily chosen to foreground politics as an inherent part of the proceedings. As Jørgen Franck, former interim director of TV for the EBU has suggested, …the song contest is a battlefield where you can allow yourself to be a patriot. You can even allow yourself to be a nationalist, which is a word you don’t want to attach very much to people these days. You can support your own country. You can say the others stink. It’s harmless but it’s very significant. If we didn’t have that battlefield, we might have more battles. (cited in Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, p. 99)

These battles, thankfully, are waged firmly within the paradigm of a democratic contest rather than a military war. Indeed, Eurovision has many parallels with electoral democracy, from the selection of national artists and performances to represent a country (akin to the selection of candidates by political parties), to the winner being chosen by a competitive vote (ranging from exclusive processes such as through national juries, to inclusive methods such as public votes), to the highly performative act of scrutineering the voting during the broadcast. And like electoral democracies, the voting system for Eurovision has undergone significant change since the contest’s inception (see Mangan 2004). The competitors in the first Contest (1956) were limited to Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and West Germany, reflecting the post-World War II context in which Eurovision was established. The winning song was chosen by the votes of national juries comprised of just two representatives, who awarded ten points each to their favourite song. This first Contest was shrouded in controversy. Switzerland was announced as the winner, but none of the voting data or scores were made publicly available. The rule stipulating that a country could not vote for its own song had not come into force yet and Luxembourg did not send a jury—allowing the Swiss to vote for them. The following year, the size of the national juries was expanded significantly to ten members for each participating country—with each member casting one vote for his or her favourite song, and they could not vote for their own country’s entrant. The scoreboard was introduced, which created both dramatic tension as results were revealed but

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also provided transparency around the process of voting that the very first contested lacked. The changes to the voting system were largely modelled on the United Kingdom’s Festival of British Popular Songs, which used a system of regional juries to select the United Kingdom’s Eurovision entrant (O’Connor 2005, p. 10). In many ways the 1957 rule changes can be seen as an attempt to adopt ‘best practice’; increasing the transparency of the vote, enlarging the number of people who participate in the decision, and doing so based on a system where some notion of representativeness (in this case regional) was essential to the legitimacy of the process. In 1962, the voting process was changed to add a preferential, or ranking element to the selection of the winner. At the jury level, the ten members each gave three points to their favourite song, two points to their second favourite and one point to their third favourite. These scores were tallied, and then a separate score was awarded to the top three songs voted by each jury, using the same 3-2-1 ranking system. As an electoral process, the rationale behind such a ranking system was to avoid restricting choice to a single song, and in so doing, satisfy the preferences of a greater number of participants in the vote. Because points were only awarded to a jury’s top three songs, this also became the moment at which scoring ‘nul points’ was possible. Given that a quarter of countries missed out on points entirely in 1962, the system was promptly changed again in 1963 to expand the options available to juries, who were to allocate points to their top five songs, rather than three. It was also suggested that the size of the national juries be expanded from 10 to 20, but this was dropped at the last-minute following concerns that the process would take too long (O’Connor 2005, pp. 22–23). In 1964 the process was once again modified to reduce the number of songs awarded points by each national jury, and to bolster the position of juries’ preferred songs by awarding five points to the first choice, three points to their second choice and one point to their third choice. Awarding points in this way is designed to produce a more decisive result, with a greater gap between the winning song and the second and third choices. In 1967 the process changed back to the way it was in 1957, with each of the members of the national juries awarding one point to their favourite song, and the vote was simply tallied. 1971 brought more substantive changes to the voting process, with the size of the national juries reduced from 10 to 2 and age requirements were imposed on jury

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members. One judge had to be aged between 16 and 25, and the other between 26 and 55. Presumably this measure was introduced to provide some assurance of the diversity of the national juries, which were for the first time required to be present in the host city for the voting and would be seen by viewers casting their votes on screen. Each member of the national juries awarded every song (except their country’s own) between one and five points, meaning that it was not possible to score ‘nul points’. In 1975 the count was introduced that is still in use today. The size of the juries was expanded again to 11 members. Six had to be between the ages of 16 and 25, and five between 26 and 55. Each jury awarded 12 points to its top song, 10 to the second favourite, 8 to the third favourite, then the songs placed fourth to tenth were awarded from 7 to one point each. While this resulted in a lengthy process, it was deemed ‘much fairer and much more exciting than the experiments used in the early 1970s’ (O’Connor 2005, pp. 62–63) due to the number of songs that would be ranked. Perhaps the most important change to the nature of voting in the contest was foreshadowed in 1997, when televoting was introduced in a limited number of countries: Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom. From 1998, the ESC moved from a exclusive system of jury voting, to maximising popular participation through public televoting (see discussion below). In 2009, the Contest switched to a hybrid system where public televoting was equally weighted with national juries, which now comprised of music industry professionals. This moved the juries from performing a quasi-representative function based on age, to constituting a source of ‘expert’ opinion that would be juxtaposed with the views of the people through the national televotes— sometimes with quite divergent results. This progression illustrates that over its lifetime, the ESC has essentially democratised, moving from a non-transparent system where scores were not revealed and only a handful of people participating in deciding the outcome, to a complex and highly-scrutinised process involving millions of voters across Europe and the world. This evolution reflects the spread of democracy across Southern and Eastern Europe and the increasing popularity of direct democracy in established states, entirely consistent with the values of modern European society as ‘democratic, capitalist ‘democratic, capitalist, peace-loving, multicultural, sexually liberated and technologically advanced’ (Raykoff and Tobin 2007, p. xviii).

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Eurovision’s Electoral System There are three aspects of Eurovision’s electoral system that have remained reasonably constant over time. The first is the principle, introduced in 1957, that you cannot vote for your own country. The second is the appointment of a scrutineer to oversee the process. In recent years the cross to EBU Executive Supervisor, Jon Ola Sand, has become increasingly prominent in the broadcast, sometimes to comic effect, but always with the aim of confirming that ‘we have a valid result’. The final aspect of the ESC voting that has changed relatively little is the system of a country attributing 12 points to its highest ranked song, 10 points to the second highest and then from 8 points to 1 point for the songs ranked from third to tenth. This is known to psephologists as the ‘Borda Count’. Like all preferential electoral systems where voters rank a series of candidates, the basic principle underlying Borda is that it produces a good compromise candidate, rather than that supported by the plurality. But it can be subject to manipulation and strategic voting. Say, for example, there are two popular songs and one ‘outsider entry’. Italy and Bulgaria are the two songs with a chance of winning, and the UK is the outsider. If a voter wanted Italy to win, they would rank that song first, followed by the UK, irrespective of whether or not he/she liked that song more than Bulgaria. The Borda vote can therefore be manipulated by elevating the vote of outsider/poor songs strategically in order to take votes away from those with a chance. This is hard to achieve on a national scale, although Eurovision voting software is built to detect and disregard instances of what Eurovision calls ‘power voting’. In 2013, Azerbaijan was accused in the international media of using Lithuanian students to buy masses of votes, and although evidence of suspicious voting was found, but an official investigation conducted by the EBU could not link that activity to any particular country (Guardian 2014). Analysis of voting patterns is one of the largest areas of Eurovision research. Studies of voting data from previous contests have identified a number of so-called voting ‘blocs’, though with slightly different compositions. For example, Dekker (2007) identified Eastern Europe, the Nordic countries, the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe. Gatherer (2004, 2007) highlighted the importance of the ‘Viking Empire’ and the ‘Warsaw Pact’, while Blangiardo and Baio (2014) and Clerides and Stengos (2012) have emphasised the former

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Soviet and Yugoslav states. Whatever the nomenclature, countries within each of these blocs will tend to score one another’s entries more highly than between them. These actions, or the perception that voting is political, pose a significant challenge for the contest as they call into question the legitimacy of the voting. As with elections that have been ‘rigged’, public support for the event declines and participants withdraw from a process that they consider flawed and in which they have not been able to have their say. Turkey, for example, withdrew from the contest after 2012 citing dissatisfaction with the voting system. Calls for the UK to leave Eurovision intensified after 2008 as it did not have any ‘natural’ bloc allies—in commentator Terry Wogan’s words, ‘we’ve not nobody to vote for us’ (Morris 2008). The UK’s initial votes for Australia (10 points in 2015) suggested an assumption that this was a natural voting ally, but this rapidly waned when Australia did not reciprocate. But a few big question marks still remain that challenge the assertion that geopolitical considerations have now become the main predictor of a national vote. Studies have shown that if it exists, this phenomenon is certainly not new—it existed long before the expansion of Eurovision to Eastern Europe (see Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, p. 4). It has also been argued that ‘the arrival of new participants has not made the ESC less fair than it was, but it has undermined the hegemonic position of Western Europe’ (Pajala 2013, p. 87). Second, we can’t discount the impact of cultural preferences and similarities within these blocs. It makes sense that Scandinavian nations vote for each other—as what is considered a ‘good’ song is shared amongst many of these nations. Neighbourly voting, such as the typical exchange of votes between Cyprus and Greece (see Fenn et al. 2006), might be explained by factors such as a common language (although the use of English undermines this argument), cultural traits and religious background (Stockemer et al. 2018, p. 432). However, research has shown that the extent of bloc voting differs between countries, and that it is in those countries that lack fully developed political institutions and still heed norms of favouritism and patronage, that bloc voting is most prevalent (Charron 2013). It is less common in democracies with impartial political institutions, which also reflect the democratic norms and meritocratic ideals that characterise ‘western’ European values. The voting that is portrayed as desirable and legitimate within the ESC is essentially a western, liberal democratic model of collective decisionmaking.

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Finally, we can’t necessarily assume that voting is an entirely rational exercise. In any case, it is extremely difficult to determine why Eurovision audiences vote for the songs they do. Using an experimental survey methodology, Stockemer et al. (2018, p. 438) found evidence of what they term ‘sincere’ and ‘bandwagon’ voting, but they also found that half of voters choose their performance on other criteria, which could include geography, culture, language, history or politics. In any case, the perception of prevalent bloc/political voting and its effect on the public attitudes to the contest created enough pressure to change the voting rules (Motschenbacher 2016, p. 15). For some analysts, however, the move was an attempt by the EBU to placate Western broadcasters unhappy with the new-entrant winning streak, and the realignment of European power relations that it might mirror (Southern or Eastern European states had won every year from 2000–2008) (Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, p. 4). Indeed, as the discussion in the previous section has illustrated, since the early days of the contest there had been problems with the jury system. Theoretically, the jury vote, where members of the jury individually rank their top songs, is much more open to manipulation. In 2015, the jury votes of both Macedonia and Montenegro were disregarded after suspicious behaviour was detected. We also saw evidence of manipulation in 2013, when the Azerbaijan national jury was allegedly placed ‘under investigation’ from the country’s president for failing to award any points to Russia. The Russian Foreign Minister said immediately after the contest: ‘Russia became outraged over how Eurovision votes for its entrant disappeared during a voting process in Azerbaijan…When 10 points are stolen from our participant, there is cause for concern’ (RT News 2013). Since the 2014 contest, the identities of the national juries are revealed before the contest and their voting records are made public shortly after. These changes have been made to increase transparency and safeguard some of the democratic ideals of the Contest.

Towards Greater Popular Participation 1997 marked a watershed moment for the Eurovision Song Contest with the introduction of televoting, or public voting, which replaced the jury-based system entirely for more than a decade. In his history of the Contest, O’Connor suggests that the catalyst for this change came from ‘the hostility shown towards the 1996 result in which such an old

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fashioned piece of music had won over the far more popular hi-energy sounds on offer’, and consequently the EBU ‘relented to growing pressure from within their ranks to revamp the system used to determine the winner’ (2005, p. 148). The timing of the shift, however, also coincides with the height of popular participation in democratic decision-making through the use of referendums (binding public votes). Within Europe, but also across stable democracies more generally, the use of referendums surged during the 1990s, which was associated with the increase in decisions that needed to be made about independence and constitutional arrangements that flowed from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War (Renwick 2017; Independent Commission on Referendums 2018, p. 21). However, the increasing importance of referendums also coincides with changing expectations and conceptions of democracy. Since the 1970s, political scientists have documented a shift from deferential and minimalist notions of democracy, where citizens simply choose their representatives, to more active demands for participation and a direct say in the process (Independent Commission on Referendums 2018, p. 21). These demands coincide with growing levels of distrust in formal representative institutions, an increased focus on polling in political discourse, growth in the number of elections in which citizens participate and a shift to more individualised and personalised preferences for political participation (Gauja 2015, 2018). Public televoting in the ESC both reflects and reinforces these changing expectations. Like other reality television game shows, Eurovision provides opportunities for citizens to exercise a democratic voice outside the sphere of formal politics in ways that are considered exciting and fun. While figures for the exact number of voters are difficult to come by (Stockemer et al. 2018, p. 431), we do know that over 10 million people voted in 2009 and that the viewing audience has more than doubled in the last decade (BBC 2012).To place this in perspective, more people vote in Eurovision than elections in Belgium, where voting is compulsory. And unlike representative politics, the Contest is particularly good at attracting a youth audience. On average, 45% of 15–24 year olds watching on 2016 broadcast stations saw the Grand Final (European Broadcasting Union 2016). By increasingly fostering popular participation in decision-making, the ESC reinforces these democratic ideals. However, the use of direct forms

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of participation and decision-making also have significant limitations. While referendums enable publics to decide among different opinions through public voting, discussion, deliberation and compromise is not intrinsic to this form of decision-making (Independent Commission on Referendums 2018, p. 10). In politics this can lead can ‘populist’ style decisions, with the views of the majority of people potentially silencing the views of vulnerable minorities in society. And indeed, Europe has been at the forefront of many of these populist style claims, particularly with respect to immigration (see, for example, Mudde 2007). In this way, direct popular participation also threatens the expression and acceptance of diversity, which is at the core of the European project. Within Eurovision, we have seen this illustrated in debates over the increasing homogenisation and Americanisation of musical styles (see for example, Carniel 2015, p. 15). It is also illustrated in the longer-term trend of an increasing number of songs being sung in English since 1999, the year in which all language restrictions were relaxed (see Fig. 10.1). The figure suggests however, that this trend is quite variable (from a low of 50% in 2007 to a high of 81% in 2015/2016) and therefore evidence of homogenisation through language is limited.

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Fig. 10.1  Eurovision songs sung in English (Source Compiled by Anika Gauja)

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In 2009, the EBU reintroduced juries into the Eurovision voting process following concerns that the popular vote was being manipulated through bloc and strategic voting (see previous section). Rather than replace public voting entirely, the jury and public votes were weighted equally in determining the final result. The composition of the juries (see Table 10.1) was also changed to stipulate that the five members must be music industry professionals (radio DJ, artist, composer, author of lyrics, music producer), that they should be citizens of the country they represent, and that the composition of the jury should be representative in terms of gender, age and background (European Broadcasting Union 2019). Interestingly, similar citizenship requirements do not apply to the performers chosen to represent each country. While the move to a combined public and jury vote could be construed as democratic backsliding, today’s national juries are quite different from those that existed prior to 1998. The first difference is the more stringent criteria regarding the representativeness of the jury members, enhancing the legitimacy of these individuals as spokespeople for the Table 10.1 Key (1956–2019) Year

features

Participating National countries jury

1956 1957 1962 1971 1975 1997

7 10 16 18 19 25

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

1998 2009

25 43

Nob Yes

aPublic

of

the

Eurovision

vote:

Who

participates?

Size

Composition requirements

Public vote

Weighting

2 10 10 2 11 11

– – – Age of jurists Age of jurists Age of jurists

– – – – – Yesa

100% Jury 100% Jury 100% Jury 100% Jury 100% Jury 100% Jury or 100% Public 100% Public 50% Jury/50% Public

– – Yes 5 Music Yes industry professionals; citizens; gender, age & background

voting was used in Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom juries existed but were only to be used in the case of technical errors/lack of phone coverage

bBackup

etc. Source Compiled by the author

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population. The second key difference is the clear emphasis on ‘expertise’ through the requirement that jury members be music industry professionals. This emphasis on expertise is particularly significant since it is analogous to the concept of ‘technocratic governments’, comprised on non-partisan, expert decision-makers, which were appointed from the beginning of the Eurocrisis in Hungary (2009), the Czech Republic (2009), Italy (2011), Greece (2011) and Bulgaria (2013) (Pastorella 2016, p. 948; McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2014). The shift to national juries as expert arbiters in the ESC in order to mitigate the effects of bloc voting therefore mirrored the significant changes in European polities that occurred as technocratic governments and expert policy-makers became prominent features in many European countries’ governance arrangements in response to the financial crisis. In the years since the Eurocrisis, the spread of populist discourse and parties has been interpreted as a backlash against this form of decision-making, with expert opinion directly pitted against the voice of the people, exemplified by UK cabinet minister Michael Gove’s dismissal of experts, who in his view ‘wreaked all kinds of economic disaster across Europe’ (Gove 2016; also see, for example, Taggart 2004). In 2016, changes to the system of aggregating individual countries’ results highlighted a similar tension in the context of the Song Contest. Until 2016, the jury and televote results had always been combined when determining a country’s allocation of points. This was changed so that the jury vote and the televote were tabulated and reported separately. While this system was designed to produce a more exciting broadcast experience as the results were revealed, it has also had the effect of highlighting instances where the jury and public votes diverged, thus creating significant tensions in the decision-making process. This was illustrated in 2016, when the winning song, 1944 by Jamala (Ukraine) failed to win either the popular vote (which was won by Russia), or the jury vote (which was won by Australia). The results of the 2016 competition also shows the mechanics of the Borda vote in producing compromise winners (see previous section).

National Song Selection Processes Voting for their favourite song is not the only opportunity that the public has to participate in the ESC. Under the rules, each participating national broadcaster needs to select an entry to represent the

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country. How it does so is at the broadcaster’s sole discretion (European Broadcasting Union 2019). This process is analogous in many ways to how political parties select their candidates to contest elections (see, for example, Hazan and Rahat 2010). At one end of the spectrum we have highly participatory selection processes like Melodifestivalen, which is a popular song contest that selects the Swedish national entry over six televised shows. At the other end are countries where the national contestant is simply announced by the partner broadcaster, which was the process used by Australian broadcaster SBS from to 2015–2018. Table 10.2 illustrates the diverse ways in which countries select their Eurovision entries, for all participating countries at each contest from 2008 to 2018. The selection processes are grouped into three broad categories. The first is selection by an elite jury, which is determined by the national broadcaster with no input from the public. The second and third categories represent instances where a jury decision is combined with some input from the public. This typically happens in two ways. First, through a multi-stage process, where for example, a jury selects a range of songs, which then are subject to a public vote to determine the entrant. Second, through a multi-stage process where jury and public votes are combined throughout (similar to the format of the Contest itself). The figures in each column represent the number of times a country has used a particular process in selecting its songs, also expressed as a percentage. For example, Serbia has competed in the contest 10 times since 2008. On three occasions, it has selected its entry by an elite jury, on three occasions by a multi-stage process, and on four occasions, by a multi-stage process were jury and public votes are weighed and tallied together. The data reveal a number of interesting trends. The first is that no country uses a public vote (exclusively) to select their song, hence there is no column included for this selection method. A jury always comes into play, often making an initial selection before songs are presented to the public. The second is the genuine diversity in the processes used, and the willingness of most countries to change how their entries are selected from year-to-year. The final row (TOTAL) shows that the selection processes for all counties at all contests is split equally between a jury vote, and a mixed, weighted multi-stage process (36% each). The mixed multi-stage process where jury and public votes are separated occurs in 28% of selections.

214  A. GAUJA Table 10.2  Eurovision national song selection processes 2008–2018 Country

Elite jury

Albania Andorra Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia F.Y.R. Macedonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Israel Italy Latvia Lithuania Malta Moldova Montenegro Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia

(11/11) 100% (1/2) 50% (6/10) 60% (4/4) 100% (3/8) 37% (10/11) 91% (2/11) 18% (7/11) 64% (6/6) 100% (5/9) 55% (5/9) 55% (5/10) 50% (4/6) (66%)

(6/11) 55% (1/11) 9% (10/11) 91% (5/9) 55%a (2/11) 18% (4/11) 36% (3/10) 30% (3/11) 27% (5/11) 45% (1/8) 12%

(7/9) 78% (10/11) 91% (2/9) 22%

(6/10) 60% (8/9) 89% (3/10) 30% (2/4) 50%

Mixed: multi-stage

Mixed: weighted multi-stage

(1/2) 50% (4/10) 40% (4/8) 50% (8/11) 73% (2/11) 18%

(1/9) 11% (1/9) 11% (1/10) 10% (1/6) 17% (5/11) 45% (11/11) 100% (5/11) 45% (1/9) 11% (7/11) 64% (7/10) 70% (11/11) 100% (1/11) 9% (3/11) 27% (7/8) 88%b (5/11) 45% (1/11) 9% (2/11) 18%

(1/8) 13% (1/11) 9% (1/11) 9% (2/11) 18%

(3/9) 33% (3/9) 33% (4/10) 40% (1/6) 17% (6/11) 55% (5/11) 45% (5/11) 45% (1/11) 9% (3/9) 33% (2/11) 18% (7/11) 64%

(7/11) 64% (3/11) 27% (6/11) 55% (10/11) 91% (9/11) 82% (11/11) 100%

(2/9) 22% (1/11) 9% (11/11) 100% (3/9) 33% (3/9) 33% (2/10) 20% (1/10) 10% (3/10) 30%

(4/9) 44% (6/9) 67% (8/10) 80% (3/10) 30% (1/9) 11% (4/10) 40% (2/4) 50% (continued)

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Table 10.2  (continued) Country

Elite jury

Mixed: multi-stage

Mixed: weighted multi-stage

Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Total

(1/11) 9% (1/11) 9%

(6/11) 55% (4/11) 36%c

(3/11) 27% (5/5) 100% (2/10) 20% (6/11) 55% (165/451) 36%

(3/11) 27%

(4/11) 36% (6/11) 55% (11/11) 100% (5/11) 45%

(2/11) 18% (125/451) 28%

(8/10) 80% (3/11) 27% (161/451) 36%

Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number aThough Georgia competed in 2008, data regarding the selection process was not available bFrom 2011–2013, Italy’s entry was selected from the pool of contestants of the Sanremo Music Festival by an elite jury. The artist was selected independent of their results in the Sanremo competition. From 2015–2018 the winning artist of the campioni section of the Sanremo Festival had the right to represent Italy at that year’s Eurovision. If the artist did not want to compete, RAI reserved the right to select participants according to their own criteria cIn 2011, the Spanish pre-Eurovision competition Destino Eurovisión used a novel knock-out selection process where scores from the jury and public televotes were not combined. Jurors and the public each advanced contestants through the competition until the last stage, where the winner was decided by 100% televote Source Compiled by author

Third, there does not appear to be any clear relationship between the robustness of a country’s democratic institutions and the method of selection used. While Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Turkey have always used exclusive selection processes (elite jury), so have countries such as Australia and the Netherlands. While the selection process arguably mirrors the democratic processes within a country (or reflect their shortcomings), it may also be the result of commercial and practical considerations (Carniel 2018, pp. 89–90). The preference for competing nations to use a mixed selection process, combining both jury and public voting, both mirrors what is used in the actual contest and provides what political party scholars (see, for example, Hazan and Rahat 2010) would argue is the ‘best’ way of selecting a candidate. Research has shown that the democratic ideals of participation (secured by maximising the number of people who can vote) and ensuring diversity (protected by jury voting) are best reconciled when an initial list of entrants is compiled by a jury and then put forward for a public vote (most closely resembling the mixed, multi-stage process.

216  A. GAUJA

This is, in part, confirmed by the results: since 2008, only three of the winning songs were selected through an exclusive process (Russia, Germany and Azerbaijan). The remaining seven songs were selected in national song competitions that combined both jury and public voting. Australia, for example, has used its relatively exclusive and undemocratic process of song selection to strategically showcase the diversity of Australian artists and create a connection to Australia’s geographic region, selecting Malaysian born Guy Sebastian (2015), South Korean born Dami Im (2016) and Isaiah Firebrace (2017) and Jessica Mauboy (2018)—both of whom have Indigenous heritage (see Carniel 2017, pp. 20–21).

Conclusion The story of Eurovision—like Europe—is one of political integration, of the difficult challenge of promoting unity while maintaining diversity. But as this chapter has shown, it is also a story that reflects the diversity, development and changing normative ideals of modern democracies. From its inception, Eurovision has struggled with getting the democratic balance right: although voting has always been at the heart of the Contest (and of representative democracy in Europe), who can vote, and how votes are tallied, has changed through the years—with important consequences. Voting during the early days of the Contest told a story of post-war consolidation and institution building, as the number of participating countries and the juries who selected the winner expanded and the voting process itself changed to favour a system that would produce compromise outcome. The introduction of the televote in the 1990s reflected the demand for more inclusive decision-making process where citizens could have their say. The return of juries in 2009 coincided with the installation of technocratic governments throughout Europe, and most recently, the populist challenge has highlighted some of the problems of over reliance on popular participation and direct voting as forms of political decision-making. The chapter also argued that the ideals, and challenges of democratic decision-making are present in the ways in which countries select their national entrants. An analysis of data on the type of mechanisms countries use revealed significant diversity in processes, but a clear trend towards combining jury and public voting—reflecting the structure of the contest itself and attempting to find a balance between popular participation, expert opinion and emphasising diversity.

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Given that the contest has evolved alongside democracy in Europe, it will continue to adapt as new challenges emerge. As Europe struggles with the rise of far-right populism and increasing disaffection with the formal institutions of politics, the Contest’s commitment to diversity, participation and democracy will become ever more important in an increasingly fragmented political landscape. Acknowledgement   Thanks to Jordan McSwiney for excellent research assistance.

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Independent Commission on Referendums (2018) Report of the Independent Commission on Referendums. London: Constitution Unit, University College London. Johnson, E (2014) ‘A New Song for a New Motherland: Eurovision and the Rhetoric of Post-Soviet National Identity’, Russian Review 73 (1), 24–46. Mangan, D (2004) This Is Sweden Calling. Sydney: Random House. McDonnell, D and Valbruzzi, M (2014) ‘Defining and Classifying TechnocratLed and Technocratic Governments’, European Journal of Political Research, 53 (4), 654–671. Morris, S (2008) ‘Eurovision Contest Voting Is No Laughing Matter, Says Wogan’, The Guardian, 26 May. https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2008/may/26/news.russia. Motschenbacher, H (2016) Language, Normativity and Europeanisation: Discursive Evidence from the Eurovision Song Contest. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mudde, C (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, J K (2005) The Eurovision Song Contest. Sydney: ABC Books. Pajala, M (2013) ‘Europe, with Feeling: The Eurovision Song Contest as Entertainment’, in K Fricker and M Gluhovic (eds) Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, 77–93. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pastorella, G (2016) ‘Technocratic Governments in Europe: Getting the Critique Right’, Political Studies, 64 (4), 948–965. Raykoff, I and Tobin, R (2007) ‘Introduction’, in I Raykof and R Tobin (eds) A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, xvii–xxi. Aldershot: Ashgate. Renwick, A (2017) ‘Referendums’, in K Arzheimer, J Evans and M Lewis-Beck (eds) The Sage Handbook of Electoral Behaviour, 433–458. London: Sage. RT News (2013) ‘Russia “Outraged” Over Azerbaijan Eurovision Vote Blunder’, RT News, 22 May. https://www.rt.com/news/points-azerbaijaneurovision-russia-614/. Spierdijk, L and Vellekoop, M (2009) ‘The Structure of Bias in Peer Voting Systems: Lessons from the Eurovision Song Contest’, Empirical Economics 36 (2), 403–426. Stockemer, D, Blais, A, Kostelka, P, and Chhim, C (2018) ‘Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest’, Politics, 38 (4), 428–442. Taggart, P (2004) ‘Populism and Representative Politics in Contemporary Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (3), 269–288.

Index

A ABBA, 98, 116 Adenauer, Konrad, 24 Afghanistan, 34 Africa. See North Africa Albania, 9, 15, 40, 112, 114–119, 121, 124, 126, 214, 215. See also diaspora communities Albanian diaspora. See diaspora communities Amery, Leo, 50 Andersen, Lale (Einmal sehen wir uns wieder/We Will See Each Other Again), 31 Anderson, Benedict, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 87 Anderson, Perry, 5, 58 Andorra, 9, 214 Ang, Ien, 153–155. See also cultural diplomacy Anglosphere, 180. See also Brexit; English Euroscepticism Anglophone countries, 51, 180 Anglo-US pop music, 68

Anglo-US ‘Special Relationship’, 64 annexation of Crimea by Russia. See Russia anthem, 93, 123, 177, 178. See also Charpentier; Eurovision Song Contest, anthem; Kosovo technology of nationalism, 178 anti-LGBTQ sentiment. See LGBTQ anti-traditional style. See Eurovision song style, Balkan ethno genre Antonian, Art, 141 apoliticism, 112. See also LGBTQ ARD/NDR (ARD: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland— Association of Public Broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany; NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk—Northern German Broadcasting), 37, 38 Armenia, 9, 37, 40, 122, 140, 141, 193, 214. See also Antonian;

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 J. Kalman et al. (eds.), Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0

221

222  Index diaspora communities; European Broadcasting Union, membership change; genocide; prohibiting political content Genealogy (‘Face the Shadow’, formerly ‘Don’t Deny’ ESC Vienna 2015), 177 Ash, Garton, 27 Asia, 97, 158, 163, 168. See also Central Asia; Eurovision Asia Song Contest; Indonesia; Indo-Pacific Asiavision. See Eurovision Asia Song Contest Assia, Lys (Rep. Switzerland, winner, first ESC Lugarno 1956), 8, 11 Atlanticism (Anglo-US), 51, 63, 68, 69 Atomium, the, 80, 84 atonement. See German post-national identity atrocities, 106, 142, 167. See also domestic violence; genocide history of aggression, occupation, violence, 21, 41, 142, 143 Auschwitz trials (1963–65, 1965–66, 1967–68), 24 austere German performance, ESC, 132, 133. See also Meyer-Landrut (Lena) austerity. See under bailout measures Australia, 216. See also Anglosphere; cultural diplomacy; European Union; Foreign Policy White Paper; Mauboy, Jessica; narrative; Special Broadcasting Service Creative Australia (cultural policy 2013), 155 Creative Nation (cultural policy 1994), 155 European relations, 152, 156–158 larrikinism, 165

nation branding, 151, 152, 163, 168 participation, ESC (2015–), 156, 165, 169, 184 postcolonial, 163, 168 voting, ESC, 69, 207, 216 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 168. See also Australia; Mauboy, Jessica; Special Broadcasting Service Azerbaijan, 9, 37, 101, 106, 122, 206, 212. See also European Broadcasting Area; cultural relations; postcards Armenian ethnic majority, 193 Azeri, 162, 164 Host, ESC Finals, Baku (2012), 162, 164, 183 Membership, ESC (2008), 122 Muslim demographic, 126 song selection process (2008–18), 212, 214 voting corruption, 208 Azeri. See under Azerbaijan B Baby Doll (Serbian singer for Yugoslavia, ‘Brazil’, Rome 1991), 99, 118 Backus, Gus, 30 Badric, Nina, 104, 106 Baez, Joan, 34 bailout packages, Bundestag, 40. See also austere German performance, ESC; economic development; European multi-dimensional crises; Global Financial Crisis austerity measures, 39, 40 European Union (21 May 2010), 39 Greece (7 May 2010), 39

Index

Baker, Gilbert, 179 Baku. See Azerbaijan Balirano, G., 32 Balkan Bloc/Connection, 37, 40. See also Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system Balkan ethno style. See Eurovision song style banal Europeanism. See European integration banned flags. See flags policy Barzilai, Netta (Rep. Israel, winner ESC Lisbon 2018), 167 Basque Country, 189. See also flags policy Battle of Kosovo (1389). See Kosovo, St Vitus’ Day BBC. See television broadcasters Beatles, the, 30, 52, 59, 68 Beck, Ulrich, 27, 41 Beerten, Roeland, 87 Belarus, 9, 40, 214 Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep [Belgian Radio and Television Broadcasting, BRT], 74–76, 84–86, 89 Belgium, 209. See also Belgische Radio-Televisieomroep; European integration; imagined community; Kim, Sandra; myth; nation-state as unit of governance; Radio Télévision belge francophone [Belgian Francophone radio television, RTBF] Belgianness, 88 Brusselisation, 81, 82 economy, 84, 85 heart of Europe, 77, 80, 88 Heysel Plateau, 80, 84, 86 history, 76–78 host, Eurovision, 84 initial ESC contest (1956), 74

  223

La Maison du Peuple [The House of the People], 81 languages, 74, 75, 78, 82, 89 Leuven, 83, 87 polarised local politics, 79, 83 voting, ESC, 203, 209 Benelux Treaty. See under Treaties benevolent patriotism. See German post-national identity Benvenuti, Andrea, 158 Berlin Wall, fall (May 1990), 99 Beyen, M., 79, 84, 85, 88 Bezençon, Marcel, 8 Big Five (nations: France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy), 10 BiH. See Bosnia-Herzegovina Billiet, Jaak, 87 Billig, Michael, 5, 175, 181, 182, 195. See also European integration Birch, Alistair, 165 Björkman, Christer, 162 Black, Jeremy, 58 Blagdan, Maja, 103, 105 Blainey, Geoffrey, 157 Blanco, Roberto, 30 bloc. See communism, Eastern bloc bloc voting. See Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system blues, 31, 52 Bohlman, Philip V., 161, 183 bolero, 31 Bolin, Göran, 160 Borda count. See Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system Borić, Zrinka, 154 Bosnia. See Bosnia-Herzegovina Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), 192. See also Fazla; Feminnem; Habsburg legacy; Hari Mata Hari; newly independent post-Communist

224  Index states; Turkvision Song Contest; Yugoslavia Balkan bloc, ESC voting, 15, 37 ESC participation (1993–), 9, 91, 92, 100–102, 119 ESC participation (1993– ), 103 ESC voting, 14, 37, 100, 120 European political context, 101, 123, 145, 155, 158, 188, 192 multiculturalism, 101 newly constituted (1993), 9, 92 Ottoman and Habsburg heritage, 94, 107 Sarajevo, 92, 102, 118 Bragg, Billy (‘Take Down the Union Jack’), 66. See also English identity Brandt, Willy, 24 Brecht, Bertolt; Weil, Kurt, Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), 31 Brexit, 65. See also English Euroscepticism Brexiteers, 48 coincident anti-ESC, 12, 52, 65, 69 portraying Europe as nations defeated in war, 47 referendum, 15, 68, 69 Brexiteers. See Brexit Brilliantovaia ruka (‘Diamond Arm’ film, 1968), 137 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 8, 58, 59, 65, 99, 157, 179, 185, 209 British popular music. See Britpop Britpop, 65, 66, 68. See also Brexit; Brotherhood of Man; Bucks Fizz; Electro Velvet; English Euroscepticism; Eurovision song style; Jemini; Jones, Lucie broadcast. See imagined community, role of television; television broadcasters

Brotherhood of Man (Rep. UK, winner, ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ ESC NOS [Dutch Broadcast Foundation] 1976), 53, 59, 62 BRT. See Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep Brück, Inge (‘Anouschka’ 1967), 31 Brusselisation. See Belgium Brussels World’s Fair (1958), 80. See also Belgium Bucks Fizz (Rep. UK, winner, ‘Making Your Mind Up’ ESC Dublin 1981), 54, 62 Bulgaria, 9, 29, 113, 177, 206, 212, 214 Buranovskiye Babushki (Rep. Russia ‘Party for Everybody’ ESC Baku 2012), 182 Buruma, Ian, 77 Byzantine Empire, 113 C Campey, George, 97 Catholic. See Christianity Centenary Palace. See Palais du Centenaire Cerutti, Furio, 3 chanson. See Eurovision song style Charpentier, Marc-Antoine (Prelude to Te Deum, c. 1690), 93. See also Eurovision Song Contest, anthem choreography, 32, 38, 40 Christianity, 24, 83, 93 Chubarov, Refat, 140. See also Crimean Tatars cisnormative masculinity, 186. See also LGBTQ Closs Stephens, Angharad, 185 Cold War, 2, 23, 24, 34–36, 42, 94, 96, 97, 100, 107, 112, 114, 115, 118, 124, 156, 186, 187, 209. See also German Democratic

Index

Republic; German post-national identity Colic, Zdravko Yugoslavia ESC 1973 ‘Gori Vatra’ [Burning Fire], 98 College of Europe, Bruges, 63 Comerford, Jane, 29 commemoration, 11, 89, 140, 177, 194. See also imagined community; myth; narrative; war memory commercialism. See Eurovision Song Contest Common Market. See European Community communism, 115. See also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics communist regime, 23, 95 Eastern bloc, 9, 14, 115 post-communist states, 92 Compagnie Francaise Thompson – Houston (C.F.T.H.), 96 Congress of Vienna (1815), 78 continental resistance to European universalism, 134, 144. See also English Euroscepticism European ambivalence to Germany, 61, 62 Conway, Martin, 76, 77, 83, 86, 87 Copenhagen ESC (2014), 163. See also Declaration on European Identity Corbyn, Jeremy, 65 costume. See Eurovision Song Contest Council of Europe (CoE), 26, 122, 178, 179 Cram, Laura, 5. See also European integration Creative Australia. See Australia Creative Nation. See Australia Crimean Tatars, 189. See also flags policy; Kamala; Russia, invasion, annexation of Crimea; Serduchka; Ukraine banned flags, ESC, 189

  225

language, 145, 146 Mejlis (representative body), 140, 141 Russian persecution, 141, 144, 189 Ukraine ESC popularity, 139, 140, 144–146 Croatia, 118. See also Habsburg legacy; newly independent post-Communist states; Yugoslavia; Zagreb Balkan bloc, ESC voting, 15, 40 ESC participation (1993–), 9, 91, 92, 100, 101, 103, 118 European cultural context, 104, 116 languages, 99, 116 newly constituted (1993), 9, 91, 92 television broadcasting (1956–), 115 Zagreb (ESC 1990), 99, 102, 103, 116, 118 cultural diplomacy, 156. See also Turkvision Song Contest (TSC) Australia, Asiavision, 122, 152, 155, 156 definition, 153 German post-national identity, 27, 36, 37 Kosovan, ESC, 112, 123–125 Montenegrin, ESC, 120 Turkey, ESC/TSC, 125 Vatican City, ESC, 122 cultural relations, 151–156, 161, 162, 164, 169 mindsets theory (Fisher), 153 culture. See cultural diplomacy; cultural relations; popular culture; European commonality; European song style, blended socio-cultural space; multiculturalism; tourism Cummings, Milton, 153, 166. See also cultural diplomacy, definition Cutugno, Toto (‘Insieme 1992’ Rep. Italy, winner, ESC Zagreb 1990), 11, 96

226  Index Cyprus, 9, 15, 121, 125, 189, 207, 214 Czech Republic, 9, 212, 214 D Dakh Daughters, 131 Dalida, 30 Dana International, 185, 192 Daniel (song: ‘Ma daj, obuci levisice’/ Come On, Put on Your Levi’s Jeans), 118 Danylko, Andrii. See Serduchka, Vera Davis, David, 57, 68 Day of Commemoration of the Victims of Deportation, 140 de Angelo, Nino, 29 Declaration on European Identity (EU, Copenhagen 1973), 5, 156 Dekker, A., 206 Delors, Jacques, 1, 2, 63, 64 demilitarisation, 24 de-Nazification. See German post-national identity Denmark, 9, 15, 26, 29, 40, 105, 106, 214 Destatte, P., 79, 84, 85, 88, 89 Destrée, Jules, 80 Deutsch, Carl, 5. See also European integration, transactionalist approach Deutschmark Nationalism. See German post-national identity de Wever, Bruno, 77 diaspora communities, 168. See also migration Albanian, 124 Israel (ex-Europe), 168 Turkish, 125 Yugoslav, 99 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 165 Dieter Heck, Thomas, 31 Dinnie, Keith, 159, 160 disco. See Eurovision song style

domestic violence, 106 Donatan and Cleo (Rep. Poland, ‘My Słowanie – We are Slavic’ ESC Copenhagen 2014), 182. See also Eurovision Song Contest, nationalist structural logic Donbass, Ukraine, 144, 187 Draft Constitutional Treaty. See under Treaties Dragovic, Doris, 103–105 Dublin. See Ireland Düsseldorf ESC 2011, 161. See also postcards Dylan, Bob, 34 E Eastern Bloc. See communism, Eastern bloc Ebeid, Michael, 157, 167, 168 Ebstein, Katja (Rep. W. Germany: ‘Wunder gibt es immer wieder’ [Miracles are always happening]; ESC Amsterdam 1970; ‘Diese Welt’ ESC Dublin 1971; ‘Theater’ ESC Hague 1980), 31, 33 EBU. See European Broadcasting Union economic development, 156. See also austere German performance, ESC; bailout packages, Bundestag; European Economic Community; Global Financial Crisis; image-making; multidimensional crises Belgium, 79, 84 capitalism, 23, 156 European integration, 1, 5, 15, 23, 51, 57, 58 first stage of construction of Europe, 1 Germany, 24, 26, 32, 40, 42

Index

postwar reconstruction, 2, 26 transition, state socialism to capitalism, 107 education, 62, 82, 111. See also Flanders, French/Dutch language division Egypt, 119 Elaiza (band; lead singer Elżbieta ‘Ela’ Steinmetz Rep. Germany, ‘Is it Right?’ ESC Copenhagen 2014), 29 Electro Velvet (Rep. UK ‘Still in Love with You’ ESC Vienna 2015), 68 Elysée Treaty. See under Treaties Engelmann-Martin, D., 23, 27, 28 English Euroscepticism, 61. See also Brexit; Britpop; European Economic Community; European project; ideology; narrative, British perception of Europe as nations defeated in war; nul points; treaties, Brussels English national identity, 48, 50, 77 Englishness, 49, 66, 67 EU/ESC correlation, 7, 39, 48, 65 Euro-Atlantic divergence, 59 Eurovision-scepticism, 7, 48, 49, 69, 104 Leave campaign, 48 nostalgia, 68 politicisation of English identity, 50 Special Directive on EEC Membership (1982), 62, 63 Thatcher, Margaret, 63 trans-Atlantic relationship, 51, 59, 61 English identity. See English Euroscepticism Englishness. See Brexit; Britpop; English Euroscepticism Enlightenment, 130, 142, 144 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 112, 125 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 184, 192 ESC. See Eurovision Song Contest

  227

Estonia, 9, 15, 40, 101, 105, 214 Euro-Atlantic integration. See European integration; Kosovo Eurocrisis. See European multi-dimensional crises Eurofans. See fandom Euromissile crisis, 35 Euro-myth. See myth Europe/Eurovision parallels, democratic process, 2, 16, 17, 48, 100, 114, 138, 142, 157, 201, 203 European Atomic Agency (Euratom, est. 1957), 4, 80 European Atomic Energy Community. See European Atomic Agency European Broadcasting Union (EBU) establishment and rationale, 211. See also European project; Eurovision Song Contest; flags policy; Pride flags; prohibiting political content financing, 8, 10 membership, 8, 9, 112, 114, 115 Reference Group, 124, 157, 193 voting regulation, ESC, 206–208, 211 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 3, 4, 25, 26, 80 European Commission (Executive branch of EU, 1993–), 1, 5, 62, 63, 81, 156 European commonality, 6, 12, 17. See also European integration; imagined community; narrative European Community (EC, 1993– 2009), 11, 28, 64, 81, 84, 156, 178 European cosmopolitanism, 6, 28–30, 38, 131, 134, 164 European Economic Community (EEC, 1958–1993), 4, 51, 52, 58, 60–62, 69, 80, 81, 84

228  Index European flag, 178, 179. See also flags policy; Pride flags; prohibiting political content European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 26 European integration, 2. See also continental resistance to European universalism; English Euroscepticism; European cosmopolitanism; Europeanist concepts; European project; European Union (EU); federalism; German post-national identity banal Europeanism, 5 banal nationalism, 5, 175, 182 Euro-Atlantic integration, 113 Franco-German rapprochement, 25 research failings addressed by post-, 3 supranational governance, 4 transactionalist approach (Carl Deutsch), 5 unity in diversity, 93, 187, 193 world of nations, 181, 195 Europeanist concepts, 25, 112, 113, 121, 123 Europeanization impact. See European integration, research failings addressed by post-functionalism European Movement, 60–61 European multi-dimensional crises (pre-2010), 2, 5, 12, 15. See also bailout packages, Bundestag European Parliament, 10, 48, 62, 123, 156, 178, 202 European project, 3, 11, 12, 57, 58, 63, 210 idealised, 9, 11 European spirit, 3, 4. See also European integration European two-step, 2, 11. See also European project; Eurovision Song Contest, symbolic impact

European Union (EU), 15. See also Brexit; English Euroscepticism; Europe/Eurovision parallels, democratic process; European Community; European integration; European project; myth, Euro-myth; federalism; narrative, Nobel Australian relations, 152, 158 cultural policy, 156 flag, 60, 178, 179, 181, 188, 190–192 Kosovan independence, support, 123 LGBTQ rights promotion, 180, 185–187 Pan European idea, 51 Serbia, financial aid, 107, 121 technocratic origins, 15 Europe Day (9 May), 123 Europe – Start Voting Now!, 201 Europop. See Eurovision song style Euroscepticism. See English Euroscepticism Eurostory (Dutch journal concerning ESC), 102 Eurovision Asia Song Contest, 152, 158 Eurovision juries, 202. See also Eurovision Song Contest, mixed selection process; Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system; SMS voting systems; televoting; voting process, ESC mixed selection process (jury and public voting), 215 return (2009) coincident with installation of technocratic governments, 212, 216 Eurovision-scepticism. See English Euroscepticism Eurovision Song Contest, 10. See also European Broadcasting Union;

Index

Eurovision song style; national song selection process, ESC anthem (Beethoven, ‘Ode to Joy’), 93 commercialism, 6 competitiveness (winning and losing), 41, 151 costume, 28, 32, 36, 94, 101, 133, 143, 182 English language lyrics, 12, 32, 121, 122, 141, 143, 176, 177, 211 European boundaries, equivalence, 16, 112 inaugural contest, Lugano, Switzerland (1956), 7, 8 inclusive decision-making process, 216 logo (heart-shaped), 179 mixed selection process (jury and public voting), 215 national identity building (pan-/ sub-), 16, 21, 48 nationalist structural logic, 182, 183 preferential voting system (Borda count), 14, 206 symbolic impact, 12, 15, 21, 22, 24, 58, 96, 119, 122 viewer numbers, 6, 10 YouTube official channel, 10 Eurovision song style, 66. See also Britpop Balkan ethno genre, 93, 94 blended socio-cultural space, 95, 96 broad European appeal, 34, 36 chanson, 17, 95 disco, 31, 33 Europop, 116, 117 folk, 31, 33, 34, 95, 122, 182 genre rules, 132 German, 22–24, 26–31, 34–36, 42 grunge, 65 kitsch, 49, 130, 138, 143, 145 orchestra, 102

  229

peace theme, 36 popular, 16, 26, 29–31, 51, 52, 59, 61, 65, 92, 104, 116, 117, 131, 133, 140, 146, 182, 206, 213 schlager, 30, 31 uniformity, 17, 137 US influence, 30, 32, 92–95, 97, 98, 101, 107, 116, 125, 154, 165 Yugoslavia, 9, 91–93, 95–100, 103, 107, 112–120, 126 Eurozone, 14, 15, 39, 40, 42, 67 everyday multiculturalism, 164. See also multiculturalism; vernacular cosmopolitanism F Fabricant, Michael, 42, 49. See also Brexit fandom, 164, 184, 185 Farges, Patrick, 30, 31 far-right, 28, 42, 217. See also fascism; Nazism fascism, 23, 131. See also Nazism Fazla (band, Fazlagić Fazla, Muhamed, Sarajevo), 92, 102 federalism, 2, 4, 5, 16, 23, 58, 64, 83, 115. See also European integration Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), 8, 22–26, 30, 35, 115, 116, 203. See also Cold War; economic development; European integration; German post-national identity; military occupation; narrative Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. See Yugoslavia Federation of Association Football. See International Federation of Association Football (FIFA)

230  Index Feminnem (‘Call Me’ Rep. BosniaHerzegovina, ESC Ukraine 2005; ‘Lako Je Sve’ [It’s Easy], Rep. Croatia, ESC Norway 2010), 101, 105 Ferrara, America, 165 Finland, 9, 15, 40, 95, 105, 214 ESC Helsinki (2007), 132 Firebrace, Isaiah, 163, 216 First Balkan War (Oct 1912–May 1913), 113 First World War. See World War One Fisher, Glen, 153 flags policy, 188. See also European flag; flags policy; Pride flags; prohibiting political content; Wales list of banned flags (ESC 2016), 189, 190, 195 Nagorno-Karabakh, 189, 193 ‘Official Flags Policy’ (ESC 2016), 188 Flanders Flemish Brabant, 83 Flemish nationalism, 77, 78, 89 French/Dutch language division, 79, 83 victimhood narrative, 79 Flemish-Walloon antagonism, 78, 83 folk cultural influence, 31, 33, 34, 95, 122, 182 football. See International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) Foreign Policy White Paper, Australia (2017), 155 Francis, Connie, 30 Franck, Jørgen, 130, 203 Franco-German rapprochement. See European integration Frankfurt. See Auschwitz trials Fricker, Karen, 14, 15, 49, 130, 164, 184, 203, 207, 208 Froboess, Conny ‘Zwei kleine Italiener’ [Two Little Italians] (1962), 31

G Gagarina, Polina (‘A Million Voices’, Rep. Russia, winner ESC Vienna 2015), 187 Gaidai, Leonid (1968 film Brilliantovaia ruka/Diamond Arm), 137, 138 Gaitana (Gaita-Lurdes Essami, ‘Be My Guest’ Rep. Ukraine ESC Baku 2012), 139. See also Ukraine Galle, France, 39 Galpin, Charlotte, 28 gender diversity, 180. See also LGBTQ gender equality, 106. See also LGBTQ genocide, 141, 177. See also atrocities Genova, Poli (Rep. Bulgaria ‘If love was a crime, we would be criminals’ ESC Stockholm 2016), 177 geopolitics, 36, 39, 40, 115, 132, 135, 169, 186, 187, 202, 207 George, Stephen, 58 Georgia, 9, 12, 37, 40, 122, 177, 214, 215 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 23 Germanness. See German post-national identity German post-national identity Deutschmark Nationalism, 27 European Germany, 27, 36, 40–42 Europeanisation, 23, 41 Germanness, 32, 37, 41 national atonement, 22, 24 partyotism/benevolent patriotism, 37 Vergangenheitsbewältigung [mastering the past], 23, 28 German reunification. See Germany Germany, 23. See also Cold War; economic development; European integration; Federal Republic of Germany; German post-national identity; military occupation; narrative

Index

European hegemony, 25, 42 habitus, 23, 28 reunification, 22, 25, 37 Gifford, Chris, 58, 66 Gillard, Julia, 155 Gitte (Gitte Haenning ‘Junger Tag’ [Young Day] Rep. W. Germany ESC Luxembourg 1973), 29 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), 15, 39, 42. See also bailout packages, Bundestag; European multi-dimensional crises glocal, 107. See also Eurovision song style, blended socio-cultural space; Vucic, Sanja (Rep. Serbia, ‘Goodbye (Shelter)’ ESC Sweden 2016) Gluhovic, Milija, 14, 15, 130, 162, 164, 183, 185, 202, 203, 207, 208 Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson, 26 Greece, 9, 15, 28, 39–41, 97, 105, 113, 121, 207, 212, 214. See also European multi-dimensional crises grunge. See Eurovision song style Guinness Book of Records, 95 guitar, 33, 34, 102 H Haas, Ernst, 5. See also European integration Habermas, Jürgen, 27 Habsburg legacy, 94, 107. See also Bosnia-Herzegovina; Croatia Hadid, Gigi, 165 Hague, the. See Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal Halimi, Lindita (ESC 2017), 124, 125 Hallstein, Walter, 3, 4

  231

Hannan, Daniel, MEP, 48, 49 Happart, José, 76 Hardkiss, the (Ukraine national finalist, 2nd, ‘Helpless’ ESC Stockholm 2016), 139 Hari Mata Hari (band named for lead singer Hajrudin ‘Hari’ Varešanović, ‘Lejla’ Rep. BosniaHerzegovina, ESC Athens 2006), 100, 105 Harvey, P.J., 67 hashtag. See social media Havel, Vaclav, 92 Hearn, Jonathan, 3, 12 heart-shaped Eurovision logo, 183 Hebrew. See language hegemony. See Germany Helms, Monica, 180. See also LGBTQ Hepburn, Audrey, 38 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 145 Het Laatste Nieuws [The Latest News], 74–76, 85, 86, 89 Heysel Plateau. See Belgium Hindrichs, Thorsten, 32–34 historical compromise, 16. See also voting process, ESC, compromise historic and cultural commonality. See European commonality Hitparade (ZDF German popular music TV program, host Thomas Dieter Heck), 31 Hobsbawm, Eric, 178 Holland, 78. See also Belgium Holocaust, 22, 41. See also atrocities; war memory homeland, 92, 132, 140, 142, 145, 158 homophobia, 187, 188, 194 Horta, Victor, 82 Hoxha, Enver, 116 human rights violations, 186. See also atrocities; LGBTQ

232  Index Hungary, 9, 101, 212, 214 Hutsuls. See Ruslana I Iceland, 9, 15, 185, 214 identity-formation. See image-making identity-projection. See image-making ideology, 12. See also English Euroscepticism; European project Cold War, 3, 23 Eurosceptic attitudes, 62 linking politics with culture, 3, 12 Orientalism, 94 Im, Dami (Im Da-mi), 163, 216 image-making, 32. See also flags policy, signification; imagined community; narrative Balkan, 92 English Euroscepticism, 48 European, 11, 22, 32, 40 Germany re Europeanisation, 23, 41 identity formation, 41 identity projection, 92–94 tourism, 163 imagined community, 11. See also Anderson; European integration; Europeanisation; Ordo-liberalism Belgium, 87 commemoration, 11 composite of state and nation, 11 image of one’s communion within linguistic community, 11 national flags, 175, 176, 178, 190 role of television, 26, 31, 37, 67, 74, 75, 84, 92, 97, 98, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 125, 130, 131, 133, 137, 141, 144, 169, 209 Yugoslavia, 9

inclusive space, 82. See also Anderson; imagined community; European integration independent. See newly independent post-Communist states Indo-Pacific, 152, 157–159, 169 Instagram. See social media integration. See European integration International Broadcasting Union (IBU), 8, 114 International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), 10, 124. See also Union of European Football Associations FIFA World Cup, 8, 37, 111 International Olympic Committee. See Olympic Games International Organisation for Radio and Television (OIRT), 114, 115, 119 International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 113–115, 119, 122, 123, 126 Intervision Song Contest (ISC), 112, 116 invasion of Iraq, 65, 69 Ireland, 9, 39, 66, 103, 105, 214. See also Bucks Fizz; Ebstein, Katja; Fazla; Magazin & Lidija Dublin (ESC 1971, 1981, 1995), 102 Islam. See Muslim Islamic State, 189, 190. See also flags policy Ismayilov, Murad, 162, 164. See also Orientalism Israel, 9, 16, 24, 40, 105, 119, 167, 168, 183, 185, 214 Istanbul, 55, 100, 104, 112, 125, 133. See also Turkvision Song Contest (TSC)

Index

Italy, 8. See also Big Five; Cutugno, Toto; diaspora communities; Froboess, Conny ‘Zwei kleine Italiener’; Kim, Sandra; Oxa, Anna; Pugliese, Sergio; Schuman Declaration Mazzinian teleology (Mazzini, Giuseppe), 4 peace demonstrations (Oct 1981), 34 Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI), 98, 215 Risorgimento, 4 Sanremo Music Festival, 8, 215 ITU. See International Telecommunication Union (ITU) J Jamala (Susana Camaladinova Rep. Ukraine ‘1944’ winner, ESC Stockholm 2016), 9, 132, 139–141, 143–146, 165, 212. See also Crimean Tatars; Ukraine Jemini (Rep. UK ‘Cry Baby’ ESC Latvia 2003), 55, 65, 69. See also Brexit; English Euroscepticism, Eurovision-scepticism; nul points Jenkins, Roy, 62, 182, 194 Jerusalem, 24, 36, 54, 119, 183 Joksimović, Željko, 120 Jones, Lucie (Rep. UK ‘Never Give Up on You’ ESC Kiev 2017), 55, 65. See also Brexit Jordan, Paul, 151, 157, 160, 178 Judah, Tim, 113, 116 Judt, Tony, 6, 7, 34, 35, 42, 77, 82, 83 K Kaganovich, Lazar, 136

  233

Kaiser, Wolfram, 2, 3, 50, 77. See also European integration, research failings addressed by post-functionalism Karan, Goran, 104, 105 Kardashian-West, Kim, 165 Katrina and the Waves (Rep. UK ‘Love Shine a Light’ ESC 1997 winner), 54, 55, 65, 69 Keating, Paul, 155 Kelehan, Noel, 102 Kenny, Michael, 49, 50 Kessler, Alice and Ellen, 30 Kesteloot, Chantal, 77–79 Khvylʹovyi, Mykola ‘Apolohety pysaryzmu’ (Apologists of Scribbling, 1926), 132, 136. See also Serduchka, Verka; surzhyk; Ukraine, national identity Kim, Sandra (Rep. Belgium ESC Bergen 1986 winner ‘J’aime la vie’/I love life), 73, 74, 76, 85–87. See also Belgium King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola (Belgium), 85 Kinks, the, 52 kitsch, 49, 130, 138, 143, 145. See also Eurovision song style Klimkin, Pavlo, 139 Kosovo, 113. See also cultural diplomacy; Halimi, Lindita; Lipa, Dua; newly independent post-Communist states; Nishliu, Rona; Ora, Rita; Pacolli, Behgjet; Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK); Selimi, Petrit; Turkvision Song Contest Albanian majority, 112, 114, 118 ESC participation, 115, 123, 126 independence (2008), 112, 121, 123, 189 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 119

234  Index Mitrovica, 124 Pristina, 115, 116, 125 St Vitus’ Day (28 June, Battle of Kosovo 1389), 113, 122 ‘Evropa’ (anthem), 123 Kosovo: A Short History (1998). See Malcolm, Noel Kosovo-Metohija, 98 Kyiv ESC (2017), 55, 162, 163, 165 Kølvraa, Christoffer, 8, 12 L La Dernière Heure, 74, 85, 88 Laffineuse, Claude, 85 La Maison du Peuple [The House of the People]. See Belgium language, 28. See also Eurovision Song Contest, English language lyrics; Flanders, French/Dutch language division; lyrics; surzhyk bilingualism, Belgium, 74, 78 English-speaking peoples, 59 Hebrew, 36 multilingualism, 136 multimodal texts, 32 other language, 28, 31, 82, 101 polysemy of flags, 195 semiotics, 32 Turkish, 36 Larock, Victor, 81. See also Belgium, Brusselisation Latvia, 9, 15, 105, 214 Laurent, Pierre-Henri, 84 Lazarev, Sergei, 144 Leander, Zarah, 31 Leave campaign. See English Euroscepticism Les Humphreys Singers (1976), 29 Le Soir, 73, 74, 76, 84, 85 Let England Shake (album, P.J. Harvey), 67. See also English Euroscepticism

Leuven. See Belgium Levasseur, L., 75 LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer), 180. See also Gagarina, Polina; Pride flags; Wurst, Conchita anti-LGBTQ sentiment, 180, 186 Azeri, 162, 164 ESC gender diversity separated from LGBT rights politics, 180 ESC gender rights equality, 106 rights movement, 179 Serbia, 104, 106, 107, 185 trans-national LGBT community, 107 Liechtenstein, 122 Lipa, Dua, 125 Lisbon ESC (2018), 7, 55, 157, 158, 162, 163 Lisbon Treaty. See under Treaties Lithuania, 9, 15, 134, 214 Little Europe, 35, 64 London Olympics. See Olympic Games low culture, 15. See also popular culture ‘Love Shine a Light’. See Katrina andthe Waves Lowe, David, 153, 164. See also vernacular internationalism Lugano. See Eurovision Song Contest lyricists, 7, 33 lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature, 129, 202. See also prohibiting political content lyrics, 12, 32, 121, 122, 129, 136, 141–143, 176, 177, 211. See also Eurovision song style M Maastricht. See Treaties Macedonia, 9, 15, 40, 98, 99, 113, 114, 116, 118, 208, 214 Maddens, Bart, 87

Index

Magazin & Lidija (Lydia HorvatDunjko, ESC Dublin 1995), 105 Malcolm, Noel, 113, 115 Malmö ESC 2013, 55, 159, 162, 183. See also Sweden Malmqvist, Siw (Rep. Sweden, ESC London 1960; Rep. W. Germany, ‘Primaballerina’ ESC Madrid 1969), 29 Malta, 9, 99, 214 Manners, Ian, 13, 56. See also narrative, Nobel masculinity. See cisnormative masculinity mass European identity. See European integration, banal Europeanism Mass Observation (MO), 62 Matchbox (‘Why do I Always get it Wrong?’), 99 Mauboy, Jessica (Rep. Australia, ‘We Got Love’ ESC Lisbon 2018; Copenhagen semi-final 2014 interval act), 156–158, 163, 166–168, 216 McAllister, Richard, 7 Mede, Petra (ESC Stockholm 2016 interval act, ‘Love Love Peace Peace’), 14, 57, 159, 182 Medic, Ivana, 93 Mediterranean, 92, 95, 107, 114, 126, 206 Meinunger, Bernd, 33 Mejlis. See Crimean Tatars Melodifestivalen, 213 melody, 52 Merlin, Dino (Edin Dervišhalidović, ESC Millstreet 1993; ESC Jerusalem 1999; ESC Düsseldorf 2011), 100, 102, 105 Messina Conference (1956), 51, 58 Meyer-Landrut, Lena (Lena), 37, 132 ‘Satellite’ (2010), 133 migration, 14, 157

  235

military occupation (by Germany), WW II Belgium, 203 Ukraine, 131, 144 Yugoslavia, 97, 117, 119 military occupation (of Germany), 22. See also Cold War; World War Two Allied, 36 Soviet, 23 Millstreet, Ireland, 92, 101, 103 Milonov, Vitalii, 186, 187 Milošević, Slobodan, 117–120 Milward, Alan, 16, 80, 89. See also historical compromise mindsets theory. See cultural relations minorities, 139, 143, 178, 182, 191, 210 Mitrovica. See Kosovo Modugno, Domenico (Rep. Italy ‘Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu’ ESC Hilversum 1958), 9 Mokre, Monika, 153, 156 Moldova, 9, 40, 68, 214 Monaco, 9 Monfils, Philippe, 74, 76, 86 Monnet, Jean, 1, 4, 16, 153 Montenegro ESC participation, 9, 15, 91, 92, 104, 121 ESC voting, 15, 100, 116, 120 history, 100, 104 independence referendum (21 May 2006), 104 No Name (band), 120, 121 Morocco, 9, 16, 115 Mouskouri, Nana, 30 Mukuchyan, Iveta, 193 multiculturalism, 101, 145, 163, 164, 168 multi-dimensional crises. See European multi-dimensional crises multimodal texts. See language

236  Index Murray, Philomena, 13, 56, 158. See also Australia, European relations; narrative, Nobel Musaieva, Sevgil Hayretdın Qızı, 140. See also Crimean Tatars music industry, 30, 116, 205, 211, 212 Muslim, 113, 126 Musso, 75 Myhre, Wencke (1968 Norwegian, Rep. Germany), 29 myth, 12. See also narrative Belgian and Flemish nationalist myth of sacrifice, 78 Euro-myth, 56 Eurovision myth, 57 nationalist myth, 78 Serbian nationalism, 113 N Nagorno-Karabakh. See flags policy narrative, 186. See also German post-national identity; image making; myth; war memory; utopia Australian–European connection, 157 British perception of Europe as nations defeated in war, 130 ESC as postwar project, 11 European cosmopolitanism, 6 European Germany, 27 humanism, 142 national identity, 21, 130, 160 national libraries as state monuments, 82 new Cold War, 186 ‘Nobel narrative’, 13, 14, 56 peace, 14, 102 ‘reassurance of fratricide’, 9 success and failure, 130 tyranny of distance, 157 victimhood, 79, 80, 85 national decline, 59

national pride, 27, 37, 74. See also national identity; nation-state as unit of governance national song selection processes, ESC Albania, 115, 124 democratic parallels, 215 Germany, 216 United Kingdom, 215 Yugoslavia, 96, 112 nation branding, 21, 42, 111, 151, 152, 154, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168, 169, 201 nation-state as unit of governance, 5, 11, 14, 16, 21, 29, 58, 77, 87, 93, 160, 177, 181, 193–195 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nazism, 8, 23, 24, 27, 41, 63, 179 Neves, Mauro, 98, 103 New Labour government, UK, 66. See also English Euroscepticism newly independent post-Communist states, 92 Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), 92 Croatia, 92 Kosovo, 112 Montenegro, 92 post-Cold War divergence of new Yugoslav states (BosniaHerzegovina (BiH), Croatia, Serbia BiH, Croatia), 100 Serbia, 92 Slovenia, 101 Ukraine, 37, 134 Newly independent post-Communist states Kosovo, 120 New Matilda, 166 New Zealand, 38, 158 Nicole (Seibert, née Hohloch) ‘Ein bißchen Frieden’ [A Little Peace] (1982), 33–36, 40. See also image-making; Siegel, Ralph Nishliu, Rona (ESC 2012), 124, 125

Index

Nobel narrative. See narrative Nobel Prize for Peace, 13, 14 Non-Aligned Movement. See Yugoslavia No Name (band). See Montenegro non-political. See apoliticism; LGBTQ Nordlichter Fraktion (Northern Lights faction), 37. See also Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system North Africa, 125, 126. See also Egypt; Morocco; Tunisia North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 27, 34–36, 58, 80, 96, 97, 113, 119, 120 Doppelbeschluss [Double-Track Decision], 34 Norton, Graham, 48, 157, 185 Norway, 9, 15, 40, 73, 101, 105, 214 nostalgia, 6, 68, 134. See also English Euroscepticism Nostalgija (song). See Magazin Nothomb, Pierre, 3 Nova, Nora, 29 Novkovic, Boris, 104, 105 nuclear weapons, 34. See also Euromissile crisis nul points, 55, 65, 69, 204, 205. See also English Euroscepticism; Britpop; voting process, ESC Nuremberg Trials (Nov 1945–Oct 1946), 24 Nuttall, David, 67. See also Brexit O Oasis, 65, 68 OIRT. See International Organisation for Radio and Television Ola Sand, Jon, 206. See also European Broadcasting Union Olympic Games Beijing (2008), 183, 185

  237

International Olympic Committee, 124, 189 London (2012), 66, 183, 190 Sochi (2014), 185 Opatija music festival, Yugoslavia, 98, 103 Ora, Rita, 125 Orange Revolution (Ukraine 2004), 131, 134, 135, 177 orchestra. See Eurovision song style Ordo-liberalism, 27, 28. See also Europeanisation Orientalism, 93, 94, 164 Óskar, Páll, 185 Oslo, 37, 39, 40, 54, 55, 100, 101, 162 other languages. See language Ottoman cultural legacy, 93. See also Yugoslavia Owen, David, 64, 190 Oxa, Anna (b. Iliriana Hoxha; Rep. Italy ESC Lausanne 1989), 112. See also Kosovo; Yugoslavia, ESC participation P Pacolli, Behgjet, 112. See also Kosovo Page, Michael, 179. See also LGBTQ Palais du Centenaire, 86 Palestine, 123, 167, 168, 189 pan-European governance, identity, 22, 93. See also European Union; European integration paradox. See European integration, unity in diversity ‘partyotism’. See German post-national identity patriotism, 36. See also national identity peace demonstrations, 34, 35, 184 ‘Peace, Peace, Love, Love’ (intervalsong, Måns Zelmerlöw and PetraMede, ESC Stockholm 2016), 14, 57

238  Index peripheral (‘non-core’) European countries, 130 Petrovci, Enver, 116 Petrovic, Ljiljana (Neke Davne Zvezde/Some Ancient Stars, 1961), 95 pink triangle. See Pride flags pinkwashing, 186, 191 Poland, 9, 15, 24, 37, 116, 182, 214 political periphery, 92, 107 political structure, 17 polling, 7, 48, 61, 209 pop cosmopolitanism. See vernacular cosmopolitanism pop music. See Eurovision song styles popular culture, 17, 29, 68, 133, 134, 164 popular participation. See voting process, ESC popular vote. See voting process, ESC populism, 49, 89, 202, 210, 212, 216, 217. See also voting process, ESC Poroshenko, Petro, 139 post-bellum Europe. See narrative, Nobel postcards, 117, 152, 161–163, 169, 183, 184, 212. See also flags policy; Pride flags green-room sequences, 183 post-Cold War divergence of new Yugoslav states. See newly independent post-Communist states postcolonialism. See Australia post-Communist states. See newly independent post-Communist states post-functionalist research. See European integration, research failings post-national identity, 27 postwar era, 2, 6, 12, 24, 29, 35. See also Cold War postwar Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany; postwar German identity

power voting, 206. See also Azerbaijan, voting corruption; Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system Pride flags, 176, 179–181, 191, 192, 195. See also flags policy; LGBTQ; prohibiting political content Eurovision history, 176, 192 pink triangle, 179 rainbow, 179–181, 185, 187, 188, 190–192, 194 pro-European sentiment, 5, 24, 58, 61, 66, 67, 93, 101, 107. See also European Movement prohibiting political content, 12, 141. See also flags policy; LGBTQ; postcards; Pride flags propaganda, 131, 134, 167, 185 prosperity, 13, 26, 61 Pugliese, Sergio, 98 pyrotechnics, 40 Q Quinn, Freddy, 29, 30 R Raab, Stefan, 37–39 Radio and Television of Montenegro (RTCG), 120, 121 Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS), 97, 98, 120–122 Radio Télévision belge francophone [Belgian Francophone radio television, RTBF], 74, 76, 84–86, 88 Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK), 111–113, 121, 123–126 Radović Kapor, Ana, 154 rainbow flag. See Pride flags Rajoy, Mariano, 190 Ramljak, Pamela, 101

Index

refugee rescue boat SOS Aquarius, 177 Rehberg, Peter, 37, 39, 186 Renan, Ernest, 8, 9 representative democracy. See Belgium, polarised local politics; Crimean Tatars, Mejlis; cultural diplomacy; Europe/Eurovision parallels, democratic process; national song selection processes, ESC return of ESC juries. See Eurovision juries Rice, Timothy, 93, 95 Risorgimento, 4 Risse, Thomas, 23, 27, 28 Riva (Rep. Yugoslavia, ‘Rock Me’, winner ESC 1989 Lausanne), 98, 99, 118 Roberts, Andrew, 59 rock’n’roll, 29, 52 Rolling Stones, 52, 68 Romania, 9, 15, 121, 214 Rome Declaration (2017), 13 Rossiia-1 (television channel, Russia), 144 Royal Circus. See Belgium, host, Eurovision Ruslana (Lyzhychko, Ruslana Rep. Ukraine, ‘Wild Dances’ winner ESC Istanbul 2004), 104, 132–135, 144, 145. See also continental resistance to European universalism; prohibiting political content; Serduchka, Verka; Ukraine Russia, 187. See also Cold War; narrative; newly independent post-Communist states; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics anti-LGBTQ laws, 186 invasion, annexation of Crimea (Ukraine, 2014), 141, 144, 177

  239

new Cold War, 186, 187 Russian–Georgian War (2008), 177 Russophone, 134 ‘Russia, good-bye’. See Serduchka,Verka, ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’ Russo-Ukrainian war, Donbass. See Russia, invasion, annexation of Crimea S Said, Edward (Orientalism), 94 San Marino, 9, 122, 214 Sanremo Music Festival. See Italy Sassoon, Donald, 11 SBS. See Special Broadcasting Service Schäuble, Wolfgang, 39 Schengen zone, 40. See also European integration; European Union Schlager. See Eurovision song style Schmidt, Helmut, 34, 35 Schulte, Michael (eESC 2018, ‘You let me walk alone’), 41 Schulz-Forberg, Karsten, 13. See also narrative, Nobel Schuman Declaration (9 May 1950), 4, 25 ‘Sea of Flags’. See Mauboy, Jessica Sebastian, Guy, 156, 163, 216 Second World War. See World War Two Sediuk, Vitalii, 165 Selimi, Petrit, 111, 123. See also Kosovo Serbia, 126. See also Eurovision song style, Balkan ethno genre; newly independent post-Communist states combined Western/Eastern traditions, 91, 94 ESC participation, 91, 92, 94, 95, 100, 104, 107, 121, 123, 126 flag, 101 nationalist traditions, 107

240  Index political context, 99, 101, 104, 126 Serbian Radical Party, 121 Serduchka, Verka (stage name of Andrii Danylko), 132, 135–139, 143–145. See also Ruslana; Ukraine post-Soviet cultural hybridity, 135 ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’ (2nd place, ESC Helsinki 2007), 132 Šerifović, Marija (‘Molitva’ [Prayer]), 121, 185 Severina, 104, 105 sexual dissidence. See LGBTQ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. See Beatles Shaw, Sandy (‘Puppet on a String’ winner, Rep. UK, ESC Vienna 1967), 39, 53, 59 Sheer, Ireen (‘Feuer’ [Fire] Rep. Germany, ESC Paris 1978), 29 Sheller, Mimi, 164. See also tourism Siegel, Ralph, 32, 33, 36 Single Market. See European Community Sino-Soviet split, 116 slavery, 24 Slavic culture, 116 Slavic Pride, 185 Slovakia, 9, 15, 101, 121, 181, 214 Slovenia, 9, 11, 15, 40, 99, 101, 103, 114, 117, 118, 120, 181, 215 Smith, Will, 165 SMS voting systems, 67, 139. See also televoting Sobral, Salvador (Rep. Portugal, ‘Amar pelos dois’ [Love for Both of Us] ESC Kiev 2017), 176 social media, 140, 167, 192. See also polling; SMS voting systems; televoting hashtag, 167 Instagram, 166, 187 Twitter, 49, 192

solidarity, 14, 23, 34, 35, 63, 132, 142, 143, 186 song composition, 32, 33, 36, 41 Souêtre, P., 75 sovereignty, 16, 27, 36, 61, 175, 177, 178, 181, 193 Soviet. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Spaak, Paul-Henri, 80 Special Broadcasting Service (SBS, Australia), 10, 99, 122, 126, 157, 167, 168, 184, 213 Special Directive on EEC Membership. See English Euroscepticism Spiering, Menno, 50 Spode, 60 Ståhlberg, Per, 160 Stankovic, Milan (Rep. Serbia, ‘Ovo Je Balkan’ [This Is Balkan] ESC Oslo 2010), 100, 101, 105 Startin, Nick, 3, 49 Stephane & 3G (Mgebrishvili, Stefane, Rep. Georgia, ‘We Don’t Wanna Put In’, prohibited from ESC Moscow 2009), 12, 177. See also prohibiting political content St John Stevas, Norman, MP, 51 Stockholm, 53, 55, 159, 162, 163, 188, 192 Stråth, Bo, 13. See also narrative, Nobel Strictly Come Dancing, 67 Struye, Paul, 4 St Vitus’ Day. See Kosovo supranational governance. See European integration surzhyk, 135–137. See also Serduchka, Verka suspicious voting. See Azerbaijan; power voting Svilanović, Goran, 120

Index

Sweden Swedish Television (SVT), 162, 177, 183, 188 ‘Swedish Smörgåsbord’ (interval song, Petra Mede, ESC Malmö 2013), 159, 163 Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, 8 Swiss Schlager singing. See Eurovision song style Szondi, Gyorgy, 153, 154 T Tajci (Tajči Cameron, ‘Hajde Da Ludujemo’ [Let’s Go Crazy] Rep. Yugoslavia, ESC Zagreb 1990), 99 ‘Take Down the Union Jack’. SeeBragg, Billy Tatars. See Crimean Tatars television. See imagined community, role of television; television broadcasters; televoting television broadcasters, 7, 15, 26, 32, 37, 74, 85, 96, 99, 103, 121, 130, 157, 161, 167, 176, 184, 186, 187, 190, 194, 202, 208, 212, 213. See also ARD/ NDR; Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC); Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep (BRT); British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); European Broadcasting Union (EBU); International Organisation for Radio and Television (OIRT); Italy, Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI); Radio and Television of Montenegro (RTCG); Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS); Radio Télévision belge francophone [Belgian Francophone

  241

radio television, RTBF]; Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK); Special Broadcasting Service (SBS); Sweden, Swedish Television (SVT); Swiss Broadcasting Corporation; Yugoslav Radio and Television (JRT) televoting, 120, 124, 125, 139, 202, 205, 208, 209, 212, 215, 216 Texas Lightening (Rep. Germany ‘No No Never’ ESC Athens 2006), 29 Thatcher, Margaret. See English Euroscepticism Tito, Josip Broz, 9, 96–99, 114, 115, 117 Todorova, Maria (Balkanism), 94 Tomašević, Katarina, 94, 95 Torres, Gonzales, 22, 93 Torriani, Vico, 30 tourism, 9, 76, 138, 154, 159–164, 180 cultural encounter, 164 transactionalist approach. See European integration trans-Atlantic relationship. See English Euroscepticism Transcaucasian states, 122 transgender. See LGBTQ Treaties Benelux (1944), 80 Brussels (1948), 58 Draft Constitutional Treaty (Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, unratified, 2005), 13 Elysée (1963), 25 Lisbon (2009), 14 Maastricht (1992), 156 Paris (establishing European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) 1951), 25, 26 Rome (1957), 13, 80

242  Index Treaties of Rome. See under Treaties Treaty of Paris. See under Treaties Tunisia, 30, 115, 126 Turkey, 9, 92, 97, 101, 105–107, 122, 125, 126, 207, 215 Türksoy (International Organisation of Turkic Culture), 125 Turkvision Song Contest (TSC), 101, 112, 125 TV. See imagined community, role of television; television broadcasters; televoting Twitter. See social media U Ukraine, 185. See also Euromissile crisis; Gaitana; Jamala; Russia, invasion, annexation of Crimea; Serduchka, Vera military occupation by Russia (2014), 132, 185 national identity, 135, 144 political performances, ESC, 12, 98, 131 Ukrainian identity. See Ukraine, national identity UK. See United Kingdom Ümerov, İlmi, 140 unification, 99. See also European integration European, 7, 13 German reunification, 25, 37 post-unified Yugoslavia, 99 Union Jack, 66 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions’ League, 10. See also International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 209. See also Cold War;

Euromissile crisis; Russia, invasion, annexation of Crimea centralised, repressive governance, 49 dismantling post-Cold War, 209 military occupation of Germany, 35 post-Soviet audience, ESC, 137 Sino-Soviet split, 116 Soviet nostalgia, 134 United Kingdom (UK), 157. See also Anglosphere; Atlanticism; Brexit; Britpop; English Euroscepticism; federalism; narrative; war memory Eurocentrism, 157 performance, EU, 52, 65 state representation, ESC (1957–), 52 United States, 180. See also Anglosphere; Atlanticism; English Euroscepticism; Britpop; federalism; invasion of Iraq; World War One; World War Two flag, 178–180 geopolitical alliance, 158 musical/cultural influence, 52, 93, 95 Urry, John, 164 Usherwood, Simon, 3, 49 utopia, 12, 133, 142, 143, 185. See also Jamala V Valaitis, Lena ‘Johnny Blue’ (1981), 29 van Ingelgom, Virginie, 50 Vasilopoulou, Sophia, 3 Vatican City, 122 Vergangenheitsbewältigung. See German post-national identity vernacular cosmopolitanism, 164 vernacular internationalism, 153, 164 Vienna (ESC Host 2015), 10, 55, 162, 163, 187

Index

Viking Empire (Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania), 15, 206. See also Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system Vojvodina (autonomous province, Yugoslavia), 98, 115, 118 von Busekist, Astrid, 82, 83, 87 voting process, ESC, 208. See also Eurovision juries; Eurovision Song Contest, mixed selection process; Eurovision Song Contest, preferential voting system; SMS voting systems; televoting compromise, 206 development, 120 popular participation, 202, 208 Vucic, Sanja (Rep. Serbia, ‘Goodbye (Shelter)’ ESC Sweden 2016), 106, 107 Vuletic, Dean, 7, 22, 26, 97, 115, 117, 151, 156, 161, 179 W Wales, 66, 190. See also banned flags, ESC Wallonia, 73, 76, 79, 83, 84, 86, 88 Walloon community, 76, 85 war. See Cold War; First Balkan War; Russia, Russian–Georgian War; war memory; World War One; World War Two war memory, 181. See also European integration; imagined community; narrative articulating contemporary domestic politics, 2 atonement, 24 commemorations of mass violence, 177 ESC political censorship, 98

  243

forgetting, 8 overcoming the past, 9, 12 paradox, old and new memories, 22 symbolic collective identification, 181 tourism, 117 UK/European divergence, 59 victimhood, 79, 80 Warsaw ghetto memorial, Poland, 24 Waterloo location of Napoleon’s defeat, Catholic Southern Netherlands (1815), 78 ‘Waterloo’ (ABBA, ESC Brighton 1974), 98 ‘We Don’t Wanna Put In’, 12, 177. See also Stephane & 3G West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany; Germany white, male, heterosexual Englishness. See cisnormative masculinity; English identity Who, the, 52 winning. See Eurovision Song Contest, competitiveness Wogan, Terry (BBC television host, ESC), 49, 65, 69 World War One, 12, 22, 25, 41, 51, 63, 73, 78 World War Two, 3, 12, 13, 21–23, 25, 41, 51, 58, 60, 63, 73, 79, 80, 96, 114, 115, 137, 140, 144, 203 Wurst, Conchita, 32, 186, 187, 192, 195 X Xena: Warrior Princess, 133. See also Ruslana X Factor, the, 67 Xinjiang region, China. See Turkvision Song Contest

244  Index Y Yekelchyk, Serhy, 136 Yew, Lee Kuan, 158 YouGov (polling company), 7, 48 Yugoslavia, 120. See also European Broadcasting Union; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Yugoslav Radio and Television Balkan ethno genre, 93, 94 Balkan identity-projection, 92, 107 blended socio-cultural space, 95, 96, 107 ESC participation (1961–91), 9, 95, 96, 103, 107, 115, 116 ESC proscription (1992–2004), 92 ethnically diverse identity, 95, 114 International Criminal Tribunal, 120 national pre-selection (‘Jugovizija’; ‘Opatija Festival’ 1973–76, 98, 103

NATO military occupation, 97 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 95 non-Soviet, 97 Yugoslav Radio and Television (JRT), 115–120 Yushchenko, Viktor, 177 Z Zagreb. See Croatia Zelmerlöw, Måns (ESC Stockholm 2016 interval act, ‘Love Love Peace Peace’), 14, 57, 182 Živković, Radojka & Tine (Milutin), 95