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

Julie Kalman, Ben Wellings, Keshia Jacotine, Julie Kalman, Ben Wellings, Keshia Jacotine

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811394263
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811394270
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Commerce international

This book uses the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), as an analytical entry point to understand and illuminate post-War Europe and the drive to create an identity that can legitimise the European project in its broadest sense. The ESC presents an idealised vision of Europe, and this has long existed in a strained relationship with reality. While the trajectory of post-war European integration is a high-profile topic, we believe that the ESC offers a unique and innovative way to think about the role of culture in the history of post-War European integration and tensions between the ideal and reality of European unity. Through the series of case studies that make up the chapters in this book, analysis brings these interlinked tensions to light, exploring the roles of culture and identity, alongside and a productive conversation with the political and economic projects of post-war European integration. 

© The Author(s) 2019

J. Kalman et al. (eds.)Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9427-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Entangled Histories: Identity, Eurovision and European Integration

Ben Wellings¹ and Julie Kalman¹

(1)

Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Ben Wellings (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Julie Kalman

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Eurovision Song ContestIdentityNationalismEuropean integrationWar memoryNobel narrative

End Abstract

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, 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 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 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.

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 ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Entangled Histories: Identity, Eurovision and European Integration
• 2. Germany as Good European: National Atonement and Performing Europeanness in the Eurovision Song Contest
• 3. ‘Making Your Mind Up’: Britain, Europe and Eurovision-Scepticism
• 4. Which Belgium Won Eurovision? European Unity and Belgian Disunity
• 5. Negotiating Post-war Nationhood: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Eurovision Song Contest
• 6. Recognising Kosovo in the World of Televised International Song Contests
• 7. Ruslana, Serduchka, Jamala: National Self-Imaging in Ukraine’s Eurovision Entries
• 8. Nation Branding, Cultural Relations and Cultural Diplomacy at Eurovision: Between Australia and Europe
• 9. ‘If Love Was a Crime, We Would Be Criminals’: The Eurovision Song Contest and the Queer International Politics of Flags
• 10. Europe: Start Voting Now! Democracy, Participation and Diversity in the Eurovision Song Contest
• Back Matter