(This is a redrafted version of an academic essay, with citations and references removed for ease of reading. Please don't sue me.)
The European Broadcasting Union created the
Eurovision Song Contest in 1956 to strengthen the cultural development of a
European soul. At its most basic,
Eurovision is a contest between European nations to write and perform the best
original pop song every year, judged and scored by each other. However, from
its origin, Eurovision was guided by political strategies, namely the creation
of the EU by six leading Western states, the strengthening of Western
initiatives through an increasing number of participant states and, finally (in
the 1990s), the presence of newly-founded former USSR and Yugoslav states.
European identity can best be identified in a
constructivist framework, where Eurovision serves as a platform from which a
European identity and European values are socially and culturally constructed,
as opposed to describing a European identity that exists as a top-down
political entity. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, asserts that the
origins of nationalism is socially and culturally constructed, and not
self-evident. In this light, post-Soviet states use Eurovision as a strategy to
construct a national narrative that attempts to identify themselves as, first,
independent, and second, European.
There are three processes at work here, examined below: first,
Eurovision allows a state to present a preferred identity of European values to
itself and its citizens through popular nationalist iconographies; second, the
state then has the opportunity to present and amplify this preferred identity
to the rest of Europe; third, by adopting the European values embraced by
Eurovision, they become a member of an inclusive Europeanness that Eurovision
sponsors.
We will also briefly examine the antagonistic
relationship between Ukraine and Russia, as expressed through 15 years of Eurovision
participation, particularly looking at how Ukraine, more than any other
post-Soviet state, frequently builds its identity formation process in
Eurovision by means of interaction against the ‘other’, the other here being,
of course, Russia.
Constructing identity as a self-referential image
 |
| Ruslana. Copyright Wiwibloggs, 2004 |
Ukraine’s entry into the 2004 ESC was the singer Ruslana with the song “Wild Dances”. The
notes that accompanied the entry began, “In the very heart of Europe, in the
majestic Kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains, there lives an ancient culture
that possesses unique mystic rituals…”. Here is a perfect example of the dual strategy
that post-Soviet states harness in order to construct, for a native audience, a
national post-Soviet identity as an independent European country: first, by
deliberately placing themselves “in the very heart of Europe”, Ukraine are
deploying an identity process that uses Eurovision as a chance to prove that
they imaginatively belong to a larger European community which had for years
placed them on the periphery. Second, states harness nationalist folklorist
musical styles and narratives to create new myths and traditions. Governments
of post-Soviet states harness the notion of continuity that these folklores
provide and the notion of change with those the new myths, without making them
contradictory, and constructed within the social and historical framework.
The process of constructing a tradition must be viewed
as one of ‘essentialisation’, a process that includes in a new identity desirable
iconographies, but omits other, possibly politically inconvenient, narratives.
This essentialising of Eurovision performances by post-Soviet states has become
a frequent event, as witnessed by Ukraine’s entry with Ruslana and the accompanying story of the artist uniting “the
mysteries of the mountains with a new energy and power”.
This new narrative amplifies
a national tradition through folklorism – the memory of societies handed to
each generation through stories, song and dance - and celebrates the new performance
as a normative display of its Europeanness.
‘The
politico-cultural issues addressed inside the short-lived discursive space
emerging around Eurovision are superimposed on existing discourses, but
dissolve within a short period of time, with each intensive round adding a new
layer of sediment to public debates and social imaginaries’ (Christensen and
Christensen).
Indeed, the Eurovision Song Contest is seen by
post-Soviet states as an opportunity to present this new norm – independent
Europeanness - to its own population.
Presenting identity to Europe
 |
| Ich Troje. Copyright, Youtube, 2003. |
Eurovision also strikingly and most persuasively
allows new states to announce their chosen narrative to the European continent.
Eurovision is seen, simply, as a means for Central and Eastern states to
“return” to Europe after Communism’. Like Ukraine’s “In the very heart of
Europe…”, the 2003 Polish Eurovision entry Ich
Troje appeared onstage with his
hair dyed the colours of the Polish flag, singing the song “No Borders” (“Keine
Grenzen-Žadnych granic”) that celebrated the 2003 Treaty of Ascension that saw
Poland entering the European Union, serving both to signify to the Polish
people their new independent European identity and to announce itself to its
new European family.
Such is the importance that post-Soviet states
place on the impact of Eurovision, Azerbaijan, Estonia and Moldova made winning
the competition national policy in the early 2000s. A byproduct of the strategic importance placed
on Eurovision has seen former-Soviet states grow in domination in the
competition and, consequently, grow in the regional discourse of Europeanness. Through
Eurovision, being a mass cultural event, the peripheral states earn their
central place in European cultural consciousness by defeating this imagination,
and shifting the balance of power in their favour. Seven of the past 16
Eurovision contests have been won by a country from the former-Soviet Union.
If one of the main goals in the construction of a
new national identity is to create a national culture (the system of common
values and expectations) and define an identification depending on the newly
created, then hosting Eurovision, with an annual global audience of over 400
million presents states with an enormous opportunity.
 |
| Ukraine's 2005 Eurovision entry Green Jolly, with Orange Revolution Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko Copyright ABC, 2005 |
Eurovision is hosted by the previous year’s
winners, and hosting offers a state the opportunity to represent itself to
Europe through the “master narrative” it attaches to the entire show, through,
for example, a variety of 30-second filmed ‘postcards’ showcasing the host city,
shown to the TV audience before each new song. Eurovision allows states to
project a pro-European identity to the rest of the continent, putting the local
on show for the global. Returning to the Ukraine (not for the first or last
time), hosting the 2005 contest in Kiev after their 2004 victory, the contest
became an almost instantaneous commemoration of the Orange Revolution’, a popular protest that saw the Russian-backed
President Viktor Yanukovich ousted in favour of the democratic party of Viktor
Yushchenko, an event that set a major new landmark in the post-communist
history of eastern Europe, a seismic shift Westward in the geopolitics of the
region. The Ukrainian song entry that year worked in harmony to reinforce an
overarching narrative of Ukraine entering European (post-)modernity. Russia’s response
to anti-Russian protest, attempts at Europeanness, and its attitude to
Eurovision, is examined below.
The European family
The third construction strategy that a post-Soviet state
harnesses through Eurovision is the supposed sponsorship of the pan-European
community, as reflected in its cultural and socio-political values. The
Eurovision Song Contest is an arena for European identity, in which both
national solidarity and participation in European identity is. This view
exposes Eurovision’s usefulness in two definite roles; first, as reflecting a
grand European narrative in which post-Soviet states are eager to participate;
second, supporting the essay’s opening statement that Eurovision is guided by
political strategies, the increase in Eastern European participation has
exposed Eurovision’s political dimensions as a discursive tool in defining
Europenness or striving for Europeanisation. This may also be true for Western
countries, of course, but it is especially true for the transitional countries
in the 1990s and 2000s, where Europe represented (or still represents) a
cultural phantasm par excellence in most public discourses, which was one of
the central catalysts of the post-Soviet nation (re-)building.
We can even go so far as to compare Eurovision to
international sporting events, as both focus issues of national identity and
prestige in an international setting. To recently independent countries,
emerging from the shadow of the USSR, Eurovision, like sporting events, is
viewed as affirmation of statehood; the country has been recognised as a
legitimate state. Eurovision has become not just a mirror but perhaps a driver
of changing conceptions and realities of Europe and Europeanness since the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
Russia and Ukraine
 |
| Jamala. Copyright BBC TV, 2016 |
A common strategy employed by states in identity construction
is to identify an external, politically useful ‘threat’ that a new identity can
by described against. In new post-Soviet republics, nationalist identities are built
as much as a backlash against Russia than on a strong historic pattern of
national identity. Several times this backlash has surfaced in Eurovision over
the past 20 years, almost exclusively between two countries. Ukraine has
repeatedly voiced veiled (and not so veiled) anti-Russian protests through
their Eurovision entries, most noticeably in 2005, 2007, and last year in 2016
(Jamala, 1944, believed to be about
the Stalinist violent expulsion of Crimean Tatars during the Second World War).
For its part, Russia has occasionally attempted to construct its own
post-Soviet European identity through Eurovision, but often their entries
reflect an opposition to Europe and Europeanness, building instead a narrative
towards a romantic construction of a Soviet Union of brotherly love for all its
constituent parts. Russian involvement in the ESC is ideologically coopted by
political elites, and the identity put forward is made of nostalgia for a
glorious Soviet past.
The mixed narratives behind Russia’s Eurovision
entries since the collapse of the USSR reflects a country struggling to locate
a new identity, reminding us that Russia’s identity as a European nation
remains contested both inside and outside Russia. At the 2010 Eurovision in
Moscow, for instance, the Russian entry did not underscore the country’s
integration into Europe, but rather its opposition to it. Russia’s general
attitude to Eurovision can perhaps best be summed up by Russian journalist
Artemii Troitskii. In explaining his country’s defeat in 2009, Troitskii mused
over whether the Russian authorities did not recognise that in Eurovision, ‘the
accent is on the ‘euro’, and that those same euro-values differ decisively from
our Russian values’.
Conclusion
Since its debut in 1956, the Eurovision Song
Contest has represented one of the most consistently silly recurring spectacles
on television. Undoubtedly. However, in amongst the silliness is a process that
reflects the evolution of Europe and Europeanness, and in the 1990s and 2000s a
chance for a host of countries to say hello to Europe as an independent country
for the first time in half a century.
(28m 26. At the height of the Bosnian conflict after the collapse of Yugoslavia, for the first time ever the Eurovision host hands over to the jury of the one-year-old independent nation of Bosnia for their scores...)
A
contest that may seem trivial gives a particular relevant case for studying the
construction of national identity. This argument exposes one of the paradoxes of the
concept of ‘the nation’ described in Anderson’s Imagined Communities: ‘The formal universality of nationality as a
social-cultural concept – in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’
a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender vs the irremediable particularity of
its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis’. Under communism, the individual
states did not stand unique or independent. But, through Eurovision, these states
are now expressing, presenting and amplifying their individual nationality as a
social-cultural concept, harnessing the competition as an arena in which
participating nations stage their relationship to an idealised vision of
Europeanness and articulate new models of self-representation. In this light,
it is no wonder at all that post-Soviet states, leaning hopefully towards
Europe, would want to be a part of Eurovision. The Western, more ironic stance towards
the competition (as perfected by the British attitude for over two decades),
with its camp ideology, is opposed to the more strategic attitude of the
Eastern European participants.
Eurovision represents more than a camp festival of
diversity and a glittering celebration of inclusiveness, as if that wasn’t
enough. To some states, emerging from half a century of brutal occupation, it
was and remains a precious nation-building tool in the journey towards a new, brighter
future.
Christensen, M., Christensen, C., 2008. The After-Life of Eurovision
2003: Turkish and European Social Imaginaries and Ephemeral Communicative Space.
Popular Communication (Online), 6(3),
pp. 155 – 172.
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