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Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21567417.67.3.15

2156-7417

David A. Kaminsky,

European history and politics

Dean Vuletic's Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest represents the culmination of a comprehensive research project on the world's longest-running international song contest, an event held (as of the pre-COVID-19 time of his writing) once every year since its inception in 1956. Vuletic describes an institution whose basic elements have remained consistent throughout its existence. Each participating nation sends a single musical act to represent them. The musicians perform, and representatives of each nation vote for the best entry, with the caveat that none may vote for their own song. The only reward for winning is the honor (and expense) of having your country host the event the following year. The contest is consistently popular and consistently maligned as kitsch.The book, an ambitious chronology and geography of the contest in its decades-long history and continental spread, is the product of a massive EU-backed research project between 2013 and 2015 entitled “Eurovision: A History of Europe through Popular Music.” Its implicit underlying question is of the contest's sociopolitical function, based on the very reasonable premise that such a massive and increasingly unwieldy institution would never have survived and thrived for sixty years and counting if it were not doing some kind of necessary work. Vuletic suggests that the apparently obvious answer—that the contest might be about European identity, or the idea of Europe—is actually wrong. Rather, he sees Eurovision as a necessary arena for “nation-fashioning,” where countries can assert their identities, belongings, and aspirations vis-à-vis one another. In other words, the contest has always been more about national identities than international ones.What enables this interplay, according to Vuletic, is the contest's almost aggressively apolitical stance and its disassociation from political institutions like the European Union or, before that, the Council of Europe. To participate in the event, a nation simply needs to exist within the European Broadcasting Union, pay the necessary fees, and agree to abide by the contest rules, including an agreement to broadcast all entries. At the time Vuletic wrote his book, countries had occasionally been disqualified for failing to follow the rules, but none had ever been outright banned for political reasons (Russia became the first in 2022, following protests against the organizers’ initial decision to allow them to participate).Although he does not make the case directly, Vuletic also gestures toward another enabling factor, namely the contest's generally perceived association with bland, low-quality Europop. My ethnomusicological sensibilities had me wishing for some exploration of how the putative cultural emptiness of Eurovision's music might relate to what Vuletic posits as an absence of cohesive European cultural identity—an examination that might be complicated by close listening. As a historian, however, Vuletic has little to say about the sound of Eurovision beyond some discussions of genre choices.The book's strength lies in its treatment of the full history of the Eurovision song contest, where most other scholars have tended to privilege the latter half of its history, after 1989. That longer sweep suggests continuities in the sociopolitical life of Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall that may otherwise go missed in studies that focus more on recent developments. Of particular interest, a chapter on Cold War cultural geopolitics reveals a surprisingly porous Iron Curtain, expressed, among other things, in the interplay between Eurovision and its erstwhile Soviet counterpart, the Intervision Song Contest.The expansive scope of the book, combined with Vuletic's eye for detail, makes for a sprawling read. The chapters are arranged chronologically and by broad subject matter. Each chapter is then divided into thematic subsections, within which Vuletic moves from place to place, allowing for historically and geographically specific microanalysis. This structure serves Vuletic's overarching premise that Eurovision has always been more about the parts than the whole, nation and region over continent. It also mostly leaves macrolevel theorization to the reader. Certain themes do recur throughout the book—national entries as expressions of Euroskepticism versus Europeanism, patterns in which nations tend to do well during which periods, which countries form or are popularly perceived as forming voting blocs, and countries’ uses of the contest to whitewash their fascism or to present themselves as multicultural or legitimately European. Shifts in voting systems, locally distinct processes for selecting national acts, and the charting of which nations do or do not participate from year to year are persistent concerns for the author. Other throughlines include practical questions like how any given nation's access to the necessary technologies and funding for participation makes them central or marginal to the contest and how national and international broadcasting entities and organizational structures shape the event. Perhaps because Vuletic's underlying idea is that the contest is all about specific negotiations of national identity, he never brings these threads together for any kind of generalizing commentary.The book compiles an impressive collection of data from popular press, scholarly, and archival sources on the Eurovision song contest. Existing scholarship on the contest's role in the New Europe is mostly cited only for factual information, however. Vuletic does not engage in a sustained way with other scholars of the phenomenon in the realm of ideas, theories, or analysis. This, too, may be an effect of the book's capillary structure and Vuletic's decision to let his analyses focus on specific regions and historical moments rather than the institution as a whole.The book is written to be just as accessible to the interested lay reader as the historian or music scholar. Overall, the writing is clear and lively, though the flow may at times be interrupted by the exercise of flipping back and forth between the main text and the explanatory list of eighty distinct acronyms that pepper the writing. The straightforward organizational structure of the book by period and theme, combined with a generally lucid writing style, makes it easy for readers to jump around in the text to find what interests them.In my view, the book's most useful contribution to the literature lies in the attention it pays to the early decades of Eurovision. I particularly appreciated the story it has to tell about international telecommunications developments in the years leading up to 1956 and how the contest has shaped and been shaped by those developments since then. The comprehensive scope of the book may also, one hopes, provide scaffolding for more focused work by Vuletic and others.