1.1 European Identity and Eurovision: Challenges for Research
Investigating European identity formation is more important today than ever before. On the political level, European Union (EU) enlargement has so far led to the inclusion of no less than 28 European countries, with still more candidate countries (ALB, MAC, MNT, SER and TUR) awaiting membership. Moreover, the EU member states have recently started to establish closer ties with some Eastern European non-EU countries, as the Eastern Partnership Summits with ARM, AZE, BLR, GEO, MOL and UKR have shown. These summits have played a crucial role as pressure instruments, enforcing democratic values in countries where these have not yet been fully established or where internal political opposition is still vehemently oppressed. The simplification of EU -internal travel regulations in the Schengen area and the adoption of the Euro currency by many EU member states facilitate the movement of people, capital and goods across Europe. The Treaty of Lisbon, which has been in effect since December 2009, provides EU institutions with more regulatory power than ever before.
However, the most recent crises affecting the European landscape, that is, the Brexit, Grexit and refugee crises , have revealed quite drastically that what is still missing in this process of Europeanisation is the development of a credible European identity as the basis for cross-European solidarity. This can, for instance, be judged from the notoriously low participation figures in EU elections, which have monotonously decreased from 62 % in 1979 down to 43 % in 2014. Recent discussions of the measures adopted for the stabilisation of the Euro after the financial crisis in GRE have evoked reactions among the populations of many EU member states that echo a widely held opinion which is hardly reconcilable with a shared sense of European identity : “Why should we pay for mistakes others have made?” In addition, the recent flux of millions of refugees into the EU has resulted in mixed reactions, ranging from certain EU countries shouldering a significant share of the humanitarian burden to others blatantly refusing to take on any responsibility. In short, one can see asymmetries in the commitment to the European cause and a certain degree of Euro-scepticism due to a lack of trust in EU institutions (Meyer 2008: 11; Wodak 2007a: 72–73).
Still, it would be a misrepresentation to claim that European identification has not made any progress in the past decades. As discussed by Risse (2010: 43), the empirical evidence suggests that there are relatively few EU citizens who self-identify as exclusively European or as primarily European and secondarily national (even though their numbers are growing). The two largest groups are formed by people who identify as exclusively national (“exclusive nationalists ”) and those who identify primarily as national and secondarily as European (“inclusive nationalists ”). The success of Europeanisation can be seen in the recent growth of the latter group. The former group may also be thought of as promoting Europeanisation, although this is less true in the identification-related sense but rather in the discursive sense of shaping Europe as a concept. The two major groups of European citizens are centrally involved in the discursive construction of Europe but in different ways:
It is immediately evident that the discursive formation of Europe in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC)—the focus of this book—corresponds more readily with the political rather than the nationalist type of frame. While “nationalist Europe”, or Europe in a cultural sense, draws heavily on exclusionary mechanisms that are well known from the discursive construction of the nation and national identities , the less essentialist view of Europe as a modern political entity avoids such normative ascriptions, which in turn makes it harder to grasp (for researchers, politicians and citizens) what “Europe” is. It adds to the complexity of the issue that Europeanisation is not equally distributed among social categories, since male , young and well-educated people as well as those with a higher income and socioeconomic status or with left-wing political attitudes show higher European identification rates (Risse 2010: 46–47).[T]wo ‘Europes’ can be distinguished in mass public opinion. First, EU Europe represents a modern, political entity encompassing liberal values such as democracy , human rights, the rule of the law, and the market economy. Modern Europe’s ‘others’ are the continent’s own past of militarism and nationalism , but also xenophobia and racism. Second, ‘nationalist Europe’ emphasizes a (Western) civilization and culture with references to a common historical heritage, strong national traditions, Christianity as its core religion , and clear geographical boundaries. Nationalist Europe’s ‘others’ are non-Christian countries such as Turkey , but also non-European immigrants and large parts of the Muslim populations in European cities. (Risse 2010: 10)
The formation of a European identity that contrasts with Europeans’ well-established habits of national affiliation needs to proceed well beyond the status of an elite-based discourse (Fuss and Grosser 2006: 238), if it is to reach any deeper levels of commitment in the European population. Some European researchers and thinkers (Habermas 2008; Risse 2010) claim that the moderate success of European identity formation is due to a democratic deficit that is partly caused by the lack of a pan-European, media -based public sphere. The ESC is one of the few media events that provide exactly such a pan-European platform, and it is, therefore, interesting to investigate how it contributes to processes in the formation of European identity . Moreover, it represents a context in which Europeanisation is not restricted to members of political or academic elites, as it manages to attract hundreds of millions of viewers from across Europe (and beyond) every year, uniting them in the shared experience of celebrating European togetherness and, more specifically, of picking the European pop song of the year.
The present book deals with the role of language in processes of Europeanisation as they manifest in the ESC. Its analyses are motivated by the assumption that contemporary European identity formation cannot be adequately described by means of a mere transfer of mechanisms of national identity construction to the European level (i.e. exclusive nationalists ’ concept of Europe). Both nationalism and Europeanness are the result of discursive construction processes that have been described as the formation of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). However, European and national discourses differ substantially in their constructive mechanisms. While national identity concepts are traditionally based on a homogenising legitimisation, the New Europe has generally taken the slogan “unity in diversity ” as its motto. A focus on diversity as the basis for Europeanisation represents a greater challenge in terms of research-related operationalisation. National identities are typically conceptualised via certain defining criteria, whereas Europeanisation exhibits a conceptual openness which potentially provides a space for various cultural identities (e.g. heterogeneous national, religious or linguistic identities) and can be characterised as poststructuralist in the sense that it is, to some extent, contextually negotiable what it means to be “European” or to belong to “Europe”. The resulting European construction will generally vary, depending on which aspect is taken as a defining or salient criterion: geography, politics, culture, religion or language. In other words, while national identities may (at least partially) be based on stable, normatively homogeneous ascriptions, the concept of Europe proves to fluctuate both diachronically and synchronically, as it cannot rest on the stabilising effects of a common demos or a shared language, for example.
Language in fact plays a central role in this process as a medium of discursive construction. Traces of (potentially competing) Europeanness discourses manifest themselves in linguistic practices, which in turn can be studied by discourse analysts . More specifically, contemporary Europeanisation is often associated with a renouncing of traditional, nationally associated normative discourses . The present book studies the linguistic manifestations of such processes.
The adoption of a poststructuralist approach for this purpose is not just a purely theoretical matter. As Krzyżanowski (2010: 10–11) has pointed out, the EU (and more specifically its Reflection Group on the Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe) has recently adopted a less essentialist and less normative view of Europeanness based on the notion of Europe as a negotiable concept. Furthermore, poststructuralist identity conceptualisations also regularly surface in ESC performances. Consider the following three excerpts from Eurovision lyrics:1
The first two excerpts construct identities as not being tied to a person in an unquestionable or stable way. Instead, they are described as something that one needs to find or that can be taken over from other people. The third, a German excerpt, does not directly mention “identity” but is reminiscent of Goffman’s (1959) image of the theatre as a metaphor for human interaction and identity negotiation.2 Interestingly, there is no song in ESC history that refers explicitly to “identity” in a language other than English . This suggests that the search for a European identity is connected to (non-native 3) English as a means of n...Now’s the time to hold my head up high, find my identity.(NED 2005: Glennis Grace – “My impossible dream”)I saw my ID and it wasn’t me. It was someone else’s identity.(MAC 2004: Toše Proeski – “Life”)Alles ist nur Theater und ist doch auch Wirklichkeit.“Everything is just theatre and yet it is also reality.”(GER 1980: Katja Ebstein – “Theater”)