One last time for all the good times
In this guest post, long-time Eurovision acafan and expert in national identity and popular music in the Balkans, Catherine Baker from the University of Hull, reflects on the shifting political contexts of Eurovision and our affective attachments to them, from language diversity and internationalism, to queer celebrations, to the potential harms that stem from assuming academic and personal engagement with Eurovision is inherently positive and enjoyable.
The first time I ever watched the Eurovision Song Contest, in 1993, three former Yugoslav republics were making their debuts as independent countries, and four other broadcasters had tried to qualify from central and east European states which never entered Eurovision during the Cold War. The Yugoslav Wars had been taking place for two years, a choir from Croatia was praying for peace, and the band from Bosnia-Herzegovina, singing of a citizen-soldier’s defiance in besieged Sarajevo, had to evade sniper fire across Sarajevo’s airport runway three times to reach the qualification round. Waves of applause filled the hall when the Irish orchestra conductor stepped in to introduce Fazla’s song, and when the host finally made contact with Sarajevo’s jury on a whistling phone line. No wonder I’ve always argued Eurovision is political.
Eurovision is probably also the first place I heard popular music in any language besides English (except perhaps for French? – though the first French-language music I remember in the UK charts came from a Céline Dion album in 1995, and by then I would already have heard sixty-odd Eurovision entries, which all still had to be in countries’ official languages until 1999). Whatever the all-powerful Anglo-American cultural industries tried to tell me, Eurovision revealed to me as an English-speaking teenager in the optimistic and internationalist 1990s that the language of anglophone cultural hegemony had no monopoly on emotional expression, and that each language could uniquely convey things English could not.
Languages became my favourite subject as a teenager, and Eurovision which annually demonstrated so many languages in action at once was one of the reasons why. I wouldn’t like to say a lifetime of critical distance towards nationalism and British exceptionalism started when the BBC commentator Terry Wogan interrupted Maja Blagdan’s breathtaking Croatian performance in 1996 (still the joint record-holder for Croatia’s place on the scoreboard), making patronising remarks that I felt expected as a Brit to be in on the joke for, but it can’t have helped me feel included in the national ‘we’.
By the time I left school at the turn of the millennium, I knew I wanted to understand more about why Yugoslavia had broken up when the multinational country I lived in had not, and that I’d need local languages to do it. I practiced what Croatian I could to learn from self-help books using the websites of the first Croatian newspapers to go online, but also the music that Croatia’s marathon Eurovision selections used to open up – hinting at the musical diversity within Croatia as they went.
Even then, when I started a Masters at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and wrote a dissertation on popular music and national identity in Croatia which opened up into a PhD thesis, I never expected to be writing about Eurovision.
Then it turned out Croatian Television – the broadcaster spun out from Yugoslav Radio–Television’s Zagreb studio, which had steered Yugoslavia’s only Eurovision winner through national finals in 1989 – turned out to have been so keen to enter as an independent country in its own right and prove Croatia was now a sovereign state that it held a Eurovision selection in 1992, even before its membership of the European Broadcasting Union had fully gone through.
In 1993 one of Croatia’s top pop producers in 1993, who had composed that 1989 winning song, believed his new song for the national final had been thrown out because its sound mimicking eastern Croatian folk ensembles sounded ‘too Greek’ at a time when state television insisted Croatian cultural identity should link it to the West and central Europe, not the Balkans or the East.
And in the middle of my PhD, Severina’s participation in 2006, with an entry aiming to repackage regional folklore for an ethnopop-thirsty audience like the 2003-5 Eurovision winners had all managed to do, unleashed what may still be the biggest scandal in Croatia’s Eurovision history through a perfect storm of sexism, anti-Serbian and anti-Balkan sentiment, and cultural anxiety about the place of Croatia’s Dinaric highlands in national culture. (Look closely in her preview video and you may notice some like-minded labelmates from a recent Eurovision stage.)
From the Dinaric mountains in 2006 to Istria in 2024, Croatian Eurovision entries know their way around a stylish sleeve
(Severina performs Moja štikla with dancers in traditional Croatian dress at Eurovision 2006 in Athens)
As part of an interdisciplinary academic blogging and Twitter community in the early 2010s, whatever else I was researching in my day job, I started blogging at least once every May about what Eurovision revealed about some aspect of nationalism and popular culture – be it Western discourses about ‘bloc voting’, nation-branding and mega-events, or the contest’s often-simplistic visions of diversity and multiculturalism.
Ahead of Eurovision 2014, I wrote my first blog essay about LGBTQ+ politics at Eurovision to write up a talk I had given for LGBTQ+ History Month earlier that year, finishing with some critical reflections on the politics of Pride and the efforts of European democracies like Sweden, the host country of 2013, to look progressive through trumpeting their advances on LGBTQ+ rights while conditions where queerness intersected with other marginalisations were less secure. The theorist Jasbir Puar had termed this historical conjuncture ‘homonationalism’ in a framework she first applied to US politics after 9/11 and next applied to the pro-LGBTQ+ public diplomacy of the Israeli state as it continued its occupation of Palestine.
As anyone who’s read this far is already likely to know, Conchita Wurst won Eurovision 2014 on what she dedicated as a landmark night for all those ‘who believe in a world of peace and freedom’, a few months after the Sochi Winter Olympics and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. My follow-up post about the geopolitical imaginations woven around Conchita’s win influenced one of the main theoretical illustrations in Cynthia Weber’s ground-breaking work on queer international relations theory, and became the second half of an article on Eurovision’s LGBTQ+ politics in European Journal of International Relations that has been cited by dozens of researchers interested in homonationalism, Swedish militarism, or cultural events’ rainbow branding as well as the contest itself.
With international eyes on a bearded Austrian drag queen, colleagues in south-east European studies at the University of Graz invited me to edit a special section of their journal Contemporary Southeastern Europe on ‘Gender and Geopolitics in the Eurovision Song Contest’. As I’ve tried to do in my own work, the line-up brought together established and emerging currents of Eurovision research – an article from Paul Jordan about his research on Ukrainian entries, and possibly the first Eurovision article from another contributor to this blog series, Jess Carniel – with work by scholars who do not usually work on Eurovision but supply important critical frameworks.
Neven Andjelić’s article on the history of that debut Bosnian entry in 1993 drew from the understanding of Bosnian politics on the eve of war he had gained as part of the same generation of young Bosnian journalists as the TV producers who made Fazla’s entry a reality, while Andrej Ulbricht, Indraneel Sircar and Koen Slootmaeckers teamed up to contrast Anglo-German discourses about Marija Šerifović’s Eurovision win versus Conchita’s to ask what had changed in European sexual politics between 2007 and 2014; I continue to use Koen’s critical work on Pride in Serbia in thinking through the LGBTQ+ politics of Eurovision in city space.
Now that I write academic publications regularly about on Eurovision and its relationships of national, European and LGBTQ+ identity, I’ve found myself part of a mini-generation of queer British cultural workers who grew up watching the contest during its public ‘coming out’ in 1997-8 – when the first openly LGBTQ+ artists took part – and have since had the opportunity to engage with the event as professionals. In my case, that included leading a research study on the cultural relations and soft power of Eurovision for the British Council in 2023 when Liverpool hosted the event on Ukraine’s behalf.
Speaking to Steve Holden, who also hosts the official Eurovision podcast, for a Virgin Radio Pride special on Eurovision in 2022, I was conscious how similar in age we and some other guests must all have been when we had formative experiences with Eurovision that tied into what it was like growing up queer at a time when rights we never expected to have were just opening up.
Eurovision research events are typically cheerful affairs, where participants joke with famous song titles and exchange tropes which affirm participation in a shared fan culture; more than once I’ve logged on to a Zoom workshop and announced, ‘Hello, this is Hull calling.’ The hybrid roundtable I joined at Helsinki last month, on the other hand, had a much more sombre atmosphere.
‘Anti-pinkwashing’ activism protesting against how Israeli public diplomacy has appealed to LGBTQ+ public opinion had a latent critique of Eurovision through the 2010s as a space where Israeli institutions’ destination marketing could build on the broadcaster’s selection of upbeat LGBTQ+-friendly entries and the memory of Dana International’s historic Eurovision win as an openly trans woman. It opposed the Tel Aviv contest in 2019 outright, when the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) first added Eurovision to its boycott list.
While Eurovision live shows can allude to Russia’s attacks on Ukrainians and their culture, equivalent expressions of Palestinian grief and resilience must either stay outside the bounds of, or exist in opposition to, the event atmosphere.
(Jamala performs 1994 - an emotive and powerful tribute to her Crimean Tatar ancestors who were forcibly expelled from their homes by the Stalinist regime - in Stockholm, 2016)
Hatari’s attempt to subvert the event from within by speaking out against the Israeli state’s ‘apartheid’ treatment of Palestinians and cooperating to platform queer Palestinian musician Bashar Murad was constrained by EBU pressure, was still condemned by PACBI for breaking the boycott, and revealed more directly than ever before how the Eurovision bubble limits artists’ political action.
Eurovision is now a PACBI boycott target again, in protest at the devastating scale with which Israeli forces have retaliated against Gaza since Hamas’s terror attack of 7 October 2023. Although the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that the Israeli state must take measures to prevent any act of genocide against Palestinians, the operations in Gaza continue, with more than 34,000 Palestinians dead, 1.7 million displaced, and no university left standing.
The EBU’s expulsion of Russian broadcasters in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine raised hopes that Eurovision would react more actively to large-scale human rights violations by other states which an association of public service broadcasters accountable to their own governments turns out to be unable to fulfil.
In 2023, even the Eurovision live shows could allude to Russia’s attack on Ukrainians and their culture, and artists in Liverpool City Council’s cultural programme had further creative freedom to explore the context of war – including in the Eurovision fan village when Jamala premiered her new album QIRIM. Equivalent emotions of Palestinian grief and resilience in 2024 must either stay outside the bounds of, or exist in direct opposition to, the event atmosphere.
For all the creativity this year’s event is due to contain and all the queer celebration it should have produced, it will not be a space of joy for those who believe that a moral duty to boycott institutions from a state committing unjust acts on such a scale should have outweighed Eurovision’s business as usual, as it did when Russia was – eventually – excluded in 2022.
Venues including London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern and Dublin’s Pantibar, which usually stage sold-out Eurovision celebrations, will not be screening it in 2024, while Bournemouth Pride stepped back from a Eurovision theme it had selected in Liverpool’s afterglow after its team concluded they could not stand in solidarity with marginalised communities while endorsing Eurovision this year.
That knowledge alone reshapes my affective relationship to an event I can no longer assume an audience will see as something to enjoy, rather as I might withhold a Harry Potter reference I’d have thought nothing of ten years ago. If I hold a Eurovision activity with a group of students, does it exclude those who for deeply held reasons linked to their identity and values do not feel able to participate? When I write about the contest, who among those to whom I am accountable will I harm with the words I choose? Communicating about Eurovision is not a pastime any more.
And if Croatia is set for that first historic win in three decades of independence, why is the contest taking place in an atmosphere which leaves some of its most fervent fans regretting it had to be this year?