„Europa ist für mich ein einst zerstrittener Kontinent, der nunmehr durch friedliche, kulturelle, wissenschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit ein vielfältiger und schöner Ort ist.“
EUROVISION AND THE "NEW" EUROPE Karen Fricker Brock Univerity, Ontario, Canada
The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is among the most high-profile popular public performances of Europeanness each year; only football tournaments, such as the European Cup, can rival it. As such it is one of the biggest success stories of European public service broadcasting. It has gained this significance because of its longevity, its broad reach, and ongoing innovations that have kept it in synch with the evolving media landscape, such as the introduction of televoting and the livestreaming of the contest on Eurovision.tv -- all core values of public service broadcasting. Absolutely central to its success is its somewhat paradoxical format: it promotes and celebrates European togetherness by pitting countries against each other in playful competition to choose the best pop song in Europe that year. The competitive aspect is much more compelling than a non-competitive showcase format would have been, and it is to the credit of Marcel Bezançon and the contest’s other creators that, sixty years ago, they perceived this fact. The ESC draws attention because more is at stake than songs and performances: It is a song contest of nations, and as such, it becomes a conduit for thoughts and feelings beyond those people might have for the songs themselves. National, regional, and pan-European affiliations come into play, particularly given how strongly each entry is associated with the nation it represents (remember it is the name of the country, not the artist or song, that is voted on and appears on the scoreboard). No matter the forum, “Ireland vs. the UKâ€, “Ukraine vs. Russiaâ€, or “France vs. Germany†stir passions.
Eurovision provides a window, therefore, not just onto the ways in which nations view and perform themselves, but onto evolving understandings of the continent itself. It materializes concepts -- Europe and Europeanness – which are otherwise quite abstract and complex. Who, after all, can say what Europe is and what constitutes it? There are numerous organizations and events that purport to define Europe by means of membership (the EU, the Council of Europe, the European Higher Education Area, UEFA, the EBU, and others) but their accounts and criteria all differ. There is no unitary history of Europe, but rather a number of different and sometimes contrasting accounts, depending on the perspective, location, and affiliations of the historian. In our era, debates about the nature and limits of Europeanness have been heated and ongoing, as the breakup of Yugoslavia and the end of state socialism in the former Soviet Union created more countries eager to enjoy the benefits of European belonging, and two expansions significantly and controversially enlarged the number of member countries of the EU. The stakes are high, as the desperate efforts of migrants from Africa and the Middle East to reach European lands remind us.
Such questions -- about what constitutes Europe, how understandings and realities of Europe and Europeanness have been shifting since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how the Eurovision Song Contest has reflected and perhaps served a driver for such changes – provided the focus of a scholarly research project I co-directed with Dr. Milija Gluhovic from 2009-2011. The central outcome of the project was a co-edited book, Performing the “New†Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. In using the phrase "'New' Europe" we did not intend to reinforce a binary understanding of Europe as made up of the old (West) and new (East). Rather, the "New" Europe that we explore in our book is the enlarged, still-evolving Europe -- that which has resulted from expansion, the combination of traditional old and new. The project involved nearly two dozen scholars from various disciplines, from Central and Eastern European studies, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, French studies, German studies, media and television studies, musicology, political history, sociology, and theatre and performance studies. Members in our research network represented a range of cultural and national backgrounds, hailing from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Malta, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the UK, and (in my case), the USA.
Milija’s and my approach to this project was, inevitably, shaped by our personal encounters with and perspectives on Eurovision. Being American, I had never heard of the ESC before I moved to Ireland in 1997 to pursue a PhD at the School of Drama at Trinity College, Dublin. Ireland was then experiencing the period of unprecedented (and, as it turned out, unsustainable) economic and cultural prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger, and, I discovered, was harbouring some very mixed sentiments about its unrivalled ESC record (it has won the contest more times – seven – than any other nation). While Irish people I met at times seemed proud of that record, there was also a strong tendency to ironize and dismiss the Contest as something silly, kitschy, and insignificant. Eurovision was a tradition in which Ireland continued to be invested – hence the national broadcaster RTÉ’s ongoing participation – but I got the strong impression that the ESC had mattered more back when Ireland was less developed, and struggling for a sense of European legitimacy. Now that the country had become globalized, ESC participation was seen in some quarters as an embarrassing remnant of a past people would rather put behind them (Brian Singleton expands on this argument in his chapter in our volume, “From Dana to Dustin: The Reputation of Old/New Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest.â€) I became intrigued by the ways in which attitudes to Eurovision were shaped by the individual or nation’s positioning via-à -vis Europe. Milija, for his part, was born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and grew up watching the ESC on the national broadcaster Jugoslavenska radiotelevizija, which was one of the founders of the European Broadcasting Union. Yugoslavia was the only socialist country to participate in the ESC; that participation helped advance its standing as the most Westernfriendly among the socialist states, an important element of President Tito’s leadership. The new countries that emerged out of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s quickly rejoined the EBU and the ESC, and became, in the 2000s, some of the Contest’s most enthusiastic and successful participants, as evidenced by Marija Serifovic’s win for Serbia in 2007. Ex-Yugoslavian countries’ participation in the ESC, however, became controversial, in that some Western media and fans represented a tendency amongst these countries to vote for each others’ acts as unfair (this became known as “bloc voting†in the Western media, a term also used to describe voting patterns amongst former Soviet states). The historical, political, and socio-cultural realities of the countries that entered the ESC after the breakup of state socialism were clearly having an effect on their ESC participation -- and perceptions of that participation -- in ways that intrigued both Milija and myself.
Feeling European
With these questions in mind, we assembled a number of colleagues for an initial workshop at the University of Warwick, where Milija is an associate professor of theatre and performance studies, in June 2011. We found that discussions coalesced in three main areas, which we used as themes for subsequent research network meetings, and as the organizing principle of our book. The first area was the strong feelings that the ESC engenders, and we were particularly interested in the capacity of the ESC to produce a sense of “feeling European†alongside other identifications (national, ethnic, gender, age, and so forth). Three chapters in our book explore how the ESC reflects and shapes a sense of belonging to Europe from the early 1990s onwards. In her chapter, Marilena Zaroulia, who is from Athens, charts her (and her nation’s) shifting relationship to Europe by recalling specific moments of strong emotional engagement (positive and negative) with the ESC – an urgent narrative, particularly given Greece’s tumultuous relationship with the EU and other European bodies since the financial crisis began in 2008. My own contribution treats the United Kingdom’s relationship to the ESC, arguing that it reflects some deep-seated British anxieties about the place of the UK in the evolving Europe, and is also symptomatic of what the cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy has called “postcolonial nostalgia†(2005). Looking in particular at ESC fans, the Finnish scholar Mari Pajala’s chapter explores the ways in which strong feelings about the ESC lead to direct action in the form of “voting, complaining, and singing along†(79).
While grounded in solid research and analysis, these chapters could not help but be personal, and in editing them I appreciated learning about my peers' relationship to Europe and the ESC. I gained appreciation for the alienation Marilena felt from the 2011 Greek Eurovision act “Watch my Dance," because she could not square the song's message of defiant national pride with its spectacular and eclectic staging, which seemed to buy into the same values of globalization and late capitalism that the song itself was attempting to reject. On a more utopic note, I found myself imagining with pleasure a particular moment in the 2011 Eurovision afterparty that Mari describes in her hometown of Turku, “when the DJ played the 2010 Serbian entry ‘Ovo je Balkan’, with the full dance-floor singing along with “Beograd, Beograd, ja bezobrazan†in a language that few of them understood†(89). For myself, I got a particularly strong blast of the feelings that Eurovision engenders in the UK when I published an edited version of my chapter in the Guardian newspaper (under the headline “It’s time to stop laughing at foreignersâ€), prompting a volatile comment strand of over 500 responses, the strongest of which questioned not only my argument but my right to make it. Like song itself, Eurovision has a powerful capacity to engender feelings of togetherness and possibility, but it also serves to expose profound fractures in the structure of the European body politic.
Three chapters in our book look at this dynamic: Yana Meerzon and Dmitri Priven, who are Russian, write about the keen engagement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the contemporary ESC, exploring the ways in which political and media elites have exploited the Contest for nationbuilding purposes – not necessarily to assert a strong Russian presence in the EU, but to position Russia as the dominant force in a newly reconceived Eurasia. As previously mentioned, in his chapter Brian Singleton argues that the ESC was crucial to culture- and confidence-building in pre-1990s Ireland, which perceived itself as peripheral to Europe; but as Ireland’s economic and cultural fortunes blossomed in the 1990s – along with its sense of European legitimacy – so did its regard for Eurovision decline. For her part, Ioana Szeman explores the place, or lack thereof, in the ESC (and Europe more broadly) for Roma people, arguing that the contemporary ESC marginalizes and discriminates against Roma, particularly in the context of the increased celebration of ethnic music and cultures in the 1990s Contest.
Gender Identities and Sexualities in the ESC
My first Eurovision research project, undertaken in 2005-2007 with Brian Singleton and Elena Moreo, explored Eurovision fandom, which manifests itself in the form of year-round discussions on internet forums, parties and Eurovision-music-themed club nights, membership in fan clubs, and – the ultimate expression of being a Eurovision-lover – attending the Contest in its host city each year and receiving press or fan accreditation to guarantee close proximity to the performers. We were particularly interested in the strong affinity that some gay men feel for the Contest, and we argued in several resulting publications that some gay spectators take what is ostensibly a family entertainment and transform it through the ways they interpret it into a celebration of values and aesthetics that they hold dear: glamour, fabulousness, underdog stories, and high drama. In so doing, gay fans create “an alternative family†to the mainstream, heteronormative family that the ESC is geared to: “a queer family whose reading strategy is the discourse of camp†(13). In this we joined a number of scholars who have explored the contest through the lenses of queer, camp, kitsch, and LGBT politics, including Raykoff and Tobin, Tukhanan and Vänskä, and Rehberg. In our project, Milija and I extended this research on the queer and camp appeal of Eurovision towards wider readings of the ways in which gender and sexuality are performed on the Eurovision stage. Several important scholars have argued that, in today’s Europe, sexual freedoms and gender equality issues are being instrumentalized by the EU and other organizations, with the result of reinforcing binaries “between sexual democracies in the West of Europe and its Eastern ‘others’†(Graff 584). Some of this othering happens not just between but within countries, such as the pressures put on immigrant and other minority populations to conform to Western standards and norms vis-à -vis gender, sexuality, and marriage. Our contributors in this part of the book explore how an ever-more-diverse Europe navigated such questions on the Eurovision stage. Elaine Aston looks at images of femininity in the contemporary Eurovision, focusing on a series of acts led by strong female performers (Marie N, Latvia, 2002; Serteb Erener, Turkey, 2003; and Ruslana, Ukraine, 2004). Aston connects these to a broader international trend of figuring women’s liberation in terms of “can-do girl power†(167), but also makes reference to the declining economic and material conditions for women in the "new" Europe, arguing that these female-positive images to some extent belie harsher realities. Peter Rehberg focuses on his native Germany, arguing that the victory of the singer Lena in 2010 under the mentorship of the powerful broadcaster Stefan Raab represented a step back in German gender and sexual politics, in that Raab consistently disavowed the ESC’s queer associations and displaced the Contest’s otherness onto the East. Milija writes about Azerbaijan’s troubled 2012 ESC hosting, in an attempt to provide a counter-narrative to the “frenzied fixation†(209) of Western media on Azerbaijan’s perceived repressiveness and sexual intolerance. Calling on fieldwork he undertook in Baku and Belgrade, Milija argues that a movement for LGBT rights is very much underway in Azerbaijan (and in 2008 host country Serbia) and that winning and hosting the ESC has prompted “dynamic exchanges linking gender and sexuality with culture, ethnic and religious identities in contemporary Europe†(215). Finally, Katrin Sieg argues that the participation and considerable success of CEE countries in the ESC provides us a window into these nations’ understanding of their access to Europeanness. While critiquing conservative images of marriage and family in two of Poland’s entries (2003, “Keine Grenzen/Źadnich granicâ€; 2010, “Legendaâ€) she locates the potential for the ESC to be used as a powerful site of anti-cosmopolitan critique of the inequalities between East and West that persist in 21st century Europe in the 2010 performance of Ukraine’s Aloysha, “Sweet People.â€
Conchita's Europe
If, as I have been arguing, Eurovision has always mirrored Europe itself, what are we to make of the dramatic victory last year of the bearded Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst, who used her presence in the Contest to promote tolerance and respect? "This night is dedicated to everyone who believes in a future of peace and freedom. You know who you are -- and we are unstoppable," she said just after she won. Unstoppable indeed: Wurst has enjoyed a profile unprecedented for a contemporary Eurovision winner, to the extent of being welcomed at the United Nations by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as an ambassador for basic human rights, and her victory being recognized by Google Trends as one of the top stories of the year worldwide. Considered through the lens of our research project, Conchita strikes me as the "New" European Eurovision winner par excellence: her appearance -- revealed ever-sodramatically and gradually in the opening verse of her winning song "Rise Like A Phoenix" -- seems engineered to evoke strong feelings, above and beyond the musical and performance qualities of her act. Wurst and her team took great risks in putting this unconventional act in the running to represent Europe, as it was certain to provoke strong reactions and not necessarily positive ones. Conchita disrupts the Old/New binary, in that her exoticism and difference hail not from the traditional margins of Europe, but from a central European country -- a country, in fact, which in recent years has been associated with extreme conservatism (in the form, for example, of the controversial right-wing politician Jorg Haider). And given the complexity of her gender performance, Conchita's victory certainly qualifies as a watershed moment in the history of queer Eurovision, up there with the wins of the transgendered Dana International (Israel, 1988) and of Marija Serifovic, whose 2007 act daringly contrasted differing approaches to female gender performance. Tolerant, emotive, unconventional, subversive, progressive: these are the European values that Conchita reflects to the rest of the world. Every European reading this will have their own point of view about her act and these values; for my part, I celebrate the vivacity of a Contest that can still, 60 years on, provide an annual opportunity for Europe to take a look at itself, and perhaps be surprised by what it sees.
