Interview
Open Citizenship spoke with Karen Fricker and Milija Gluhovic to discuss their research on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). Their ongoing project examines how the contest has forged cultural interconnections that cut across political divisions between nations and shape a cosmopolitan European identity.
Fricker is a lecturer in contemporary theatre at the University of London’s Royal Holloway college. She will be the Eakin Visiting Fellow at the McGill Institute of Canadian Studies in Montréal in the autumn of 2012 and an assistant professor of dramatic arts at Brock University in Ontario in January 2013. Gluhovic is an associate professor of theatre and performance at the University of Warwick in the UK, where she directs the Erasmus Mundus Masters in International Performance Research programme.
What is your research about and what are some of your most interesting findings?
Our research project is called “The Eurovision Song Contest and the ‘New’ Europe”, and it looks at the ways in which Eurovision has reflected, and perhaps driven, changing perceptions and realities of Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a transnational, trans-disciplinary network of scholars from fields including theatre and performance studies, political science, queer and gender studies, sociology, musicology, television and popular culture studies, and European studies. Our research has revealed that Eurovision holds very different meanings and resonances for various European populations and has frequently been used as a means for newer entrant countries to perform their “Europeanness”.
You’ve said elsewhere that Eurovision “is an extremely important site for the negotiation of European identity”. What does this mean?
Over its 56-year history, Eurovision has become a high-profile platform for nations and populations to gather and perform national and trans-European identities for each other. Officially, some 150 million people watch each year, though it’s believed these numbers are actually much higher. When the contest was founded, seven Western European countries participated. This year, 2012, 43 countries competed and the contest was held in Azerbaijan, a country certainly well outside traditional understandings of “Europe”. In looking at which countries participate, what sorts of acts they send, how expert juries and televoters across Europe respond to these acts, and how the media comment on the performances, hosting and voting, it is our contention that we can learn much about how Europe is understood and is being rethought in the contemporary era.
Eurovision includes contestants from many non-European countries. What then makes the contest European?
This begs the question of how we define the terms “Europe” and “European”. There are many entities and narratives that offer contesting definitions of these terms, from the EU, the Council of Europe, the UN, varying historical narratives of European culture and change, to indeed the European Broadcasting Union (or EBU), which created and produces the Eurovision contest. Membership in the EBU does not depend on being within the traditional historical boundaries of what is traditionally understood as Western Europe. For example, Israel has competed in the ESC since the 1970s and has won three times. Many North African countries are EBU members and are eligible to compete. Yugoslavia competed in the 1970s and ’80s and the new countries formed after its breakup now compete. (Serbia won in 2007.) And in recent years we’ve seen countries of the former Soviet bloc competing and winning, including Ukraine, Russia and Azerbaijan. A central question our research asks is about how the EBU/ESC’s broad definition of “European” disrupts dominant narratives, and how that disruption is received and absorbed in various parts of Europe and beyond.
How has or hasn’t the contest had a noticeable impact on European politics?
We would classify the work done by the ESC as cultural politics or soft politics, but as politically important nonetheless. Members of our research network have focused on different case studies. Yana Meerzon and Dimitri Priven, from the University of Ottawa, place Russia’s 2008 win and subsequent hosting in the larger context of (President Vladimir) Putin’s regime’s attempts to foster a new Eurasian political-economic region, in which Russia is the dominant force. Ioana Szeman, from the University of Roehampton in the UK, explores the ways in which Eurovision has provided a platform for the further marginalisation of Roma people in Romania and throughout Europe. Brian Singleton, from Trinity College in Dublin, maps the rising and falling fortunes of Ireland in the European cultural, political and economic spheres onto the nation’s performances in and relationship to Eurovision. In all of these examples we see the ways in which Eurovision has been a conduit for and mirror of larger socio-political and economic events, movements and shifts.
The EU slogan is “united in diversity”. Do you feel that the Eurovision contest reflects this slogan?
There has always been something paradoxical in the very notion of the Eurovision contest. It is underlaid by the apparent belief that Europe can be brought together via the benign competition of acts which showcase national identities and differences. Unity, in other words, can be achieved via competition and the performance of diversity. This is a similar idea to that which underlies the Olympic Games. On the other hand, as several members of our network argue, Eurovision’s very longevity and ritual qualities, and the fact that it does its cultural work via music, give it a power that invites viewers to feel European as they watch, and perhaps vote in, the contest. The “liveness” of the event – the fact that we know that people across the continent and beyond are all watching the same contest at the same time, though from different perspectives – is part of its particular power. Thus, Eurovision promotes national and pan-national identifications simultaneously.
If officials removed the rule that you can’t vote for contestants of your own country, what do you suppose the voting results would look like? What has your research found with respect to voting behaviour?
Our project is not specifically focused on voting patterns, though there is significant existing research on this. It seems likely that if voting for one’s own country were allowed, most countries would award top marks to themselves. However, this might not affect the overall results, as it would effectively cancel itself out. One of the distinctive aspects of the contest is that smaller countries have as much voting power as Europe’s largest nations. If the UK voted for the UK, this would not be any more relevant or powerful than Moldova voting for Moldova. As regards voting patterns more generally, existing research convincingly shows that regional or bloc voting has existed for many decades, long before the post-1989 expansion. This puts in perspective the recent, persistent negative commentary that some Western media have offered on shared voting within various regions-in particular the Balkans and the Baltic states-which ignores the fact that such voting is nothing new. Such commentary, in our view, channels larger anxieties about the expansion of Europe and participates in an ongoing and objectifying construction of the non-West as tribal, sub-legal – in short, as “other”.
What is the future of the Eurovision contest?
The Eurovision is in excellent health. It has continued to expand post-1989, with new entrant countries devoting considerable innovation and resource to their participation. Indeed, Azerbaijan’s win in 2011 and hosting in 2012 are evidence of this, though the country’s lack of media freedom and poor human-rights record raised larger questions about the EBU and the standards it requires of its members. During the 2012 contest, the EBU signalled its view that the scale of the contest – three nights of television spread over five days, plus two weeks of rehearsal, and a press, media and fan scene involving thousands of people – has become unsustainable and will need to be scaled back. These are problems that come with success, which is a result of the contest’s expansion, which itself mirrors, as we have been arguing, the expansion of Europe.
Image: Eurovision Song Contest TM, All Rights Reserved
Tags: Interview