How Eurovision became a carnival of nationalism What happens when you mix chauvinism with continental camp?

It is a commonly held truism that Eurovision’s point-awarding mechanism owes as much to ethnic and political rivalries and solidarities as it does the quality of the songs themselves: Britain’s infamous 2003 nul points was widely, and perhaps correctly, interpreted as a reaction to the Iraq War, while Ukraine’s 2022 victory — with its on-stage shout-out to the defenders of Azovstal — hardly derived from its musical quality alone. When Britain hosted the 2023 contest on Ukraine’s behalf, it was a diplomatic message from the top about our nation’s commitment to the Ukraine War.

Equally, when Spain chose to enter an Argentine tango for the 1982 contest, held in Britain at the height of the Falklands War, it was a campy diplomatic snub. Eurovision and Europe’s volatile politics are deeply intertwined: Portugal’s 1974 performance was the signal for the military coup sparking the Carnation Revolution against its Catholic-authoritarian Estado Novo government, while the ageing Franco is alleged to have bribed the judges of the 1968 contest to win Spain glory and lessen the isolation of his regime. Israel’s 2000 entry — which came at a time when Israeli liberals hoped Bashar al-Assad’s assumption of power in Syria might lead to peace between the two countries — featured the performers wearing Arab keffiyehs and singing about their lover in Damascus, and waving Syrian flags on stage. The Israeli government withdrew all support for the entry, which flopped: when they flew back to Israel, the singer was spat on at Ben-Gurion airport.

That Britain, on the whole, does not take the contest seriously may tell us more about Britain’s attitude to Europe than it does the contest. Academics of nationalism and cultural identity have increasingly begun to focus on Eurovision as an object of detailed study, while it is in Europe’s east and south-east — the New Europe that has shifted the Union’s centre of political gravity eastward and, unintentionally, towards confrontation with Russia — that themes of culture and identity have come to predominate.

Consider the case of Yugoslavia, whose Eurovision history prefigured its collapse and reconfiguration into a cluster of stable ethnostates and unstable multiethnic protectorates. An early Eurovision participant — a means to symbolise Tito’s distance from the Eastern Bloc and openness towards the West — the former Yugoslavia came to rely on Croatian songwriters for its winning entries: the music of the former Habsburg lands was seen as more acceptably European than the exotic-sounding Balkan melodies of formerly Ottoman-ruled Serbia. When Yugoslavia hosted the contest in 1990 in Croatia’s Zagreb, the TV host announced to the world that, like an orchestra, the country was made up of many different parts which came together in a harmonious whole. Yet Yugoslavia’s diversity was not, in the end, its strength: neither Croatia nor Slovenia, Bosnia nor the Kosovars would send forward a contestant to the Belgrade heats the following year, as Yugoslavia collapsed into bloody civil war.

Indeed, Serbia’s triumphantly folkish 2010 entry “This is the Balkans” can be seen as a marker of cultural self-confidence following its decade-long ejection from the contest over the course of the Yugoslav Wars: expelled from Eurovision, Serbia had been cast out of the European family. Meanwhile, Bosnia’s almost inaudibly faint 1993 voting panel, dialling in from besieged Sarajevo, was given a round of applause: Bosnia’s struggle to appear at Eurovision was seen to presage its eventual journey towards the EU, of which it is now a poor and unstable protectorate. When Estonia, whose nationalist independence movement against the USSR was, after all, The Singing Revolution, won the contest in 2001, its Prime Minister Matt Laar declared that “now we are not knocking on the door of Europe but will simply walk in singing”.

Is it fanciful, then, to imagine we can trace countries’ cultural shifts through their Eurovision entries? The year before it joined the EU, Poland’s 2003 representative sang in German and Russian that he desired no borders, a remarkable cosmopolitan aspiration given the country’s history. Does this mean Poland’s 2014 entry “We are Slavic”, in which buxom peasants in folk dress danced a polka while praising their “hot Slavic blood”, a reflection of the country’s subsequent drift towards traditionalist national conservatism?

The question is not as fanciful as it sounds. The eastward expansion of the contest, like that of the European Union, has brought on stage folkish and politically charged cultural undercurrents absent from the days of interchangeable Western European pop, in a process the Swedish academic Alf Björnberg has dubbed Eurovision’s “return to ethnicity”. Just as Turkey learned that the sinuously exotic Orientalism of its winning 2003 entry — the lyrics of which more or less openly express frustration with its tortuous EU accession negotiations — presented an attractive synthesis of its Eastern heritage and then-presumed European future, so have other tenuously Western countries adopted völkisch stylings in presenting themselves to European audiences.

Greece’s winning 2005 Eurovision entry fused the country’s deeply Oriental pop music tradition with an interlude of high-camp Cretan lyre playing, a nod to the highland peasant culture underlying modern Greek national identity. With its national inferiority-cum-superiority complex towards Western Europe uneasily balanced with its Balkan peasant traditions, Greece, more than most countries, plays with these themes at Eurovision. This year’s Greek entry makes the implicit explicit, as the Sudanese-Greek singer Marina Satti presents herself as a tour guide taking a Westerner around kitsch-laden Athenian tourist traps, while also dancing in folk style to the shrill Balkan melodies of the northern Greek klarina. European and not, Western and not, this year’s entry performs in high camp the national identity crisis Patrick Leigh-Fermor expertly outlined as the “Helleno-Romaic Dilemma”.

An early adopter of the contest’s shift towards ethnicity, Ukraine’s more tragic division between East and West is dramatically displayed in its Eurovision entries. 2004’s winning “Wild Dances” purported to represent the folk traditions of the Hutzul highlanders of Ukraine’s far western Carpathian Mountains, a symbolic repository of ür-Ukrainianness from which wartime popular-nationalist motifs are still drawn, just as its 2021 and winning 2022 entries consciously utilised folk motifs, reflective of an ongoing  process of nationalist state formation.

But the country’s tormented relationship with Russia, the Other against which Ukraine is defined, has also been overtly referenced at Eurovision: its entry for the 2005 contest, held in Kyiv, was an adaptation of a protest song from the just-concluded Orange Revolution, the original nationalist and anti-Russian lyrics of which were bowdlerised to fit Eurovision rules. Eurovision tries to maintain an apolitical stance — after the 2014 audience booed Russia’s panel, the following year organisers covered the noise with taped applause — yet it is impossible to disentangle the show from the bloodier contest now reshaping Europe. Ukraine’s winning 2016 entry, following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, a ballad purportedly about Stalin’s 1944 expulsion of the Crimean Tatars, was as charged a political comment as the contest permits, to Russian dissatisfaction.

It does not take a great deal of symbolic imagination to read Georgia’s 2009 submission, “We Don’t Wanna Put In” as a response to Putin’s invasion of the country the previous year: as the lyrics protested, his “negative mood” was “killing the groove” for the country’s Western aspirations (Eurovision eventually banned the entry). Yet Putin’s Russia is far from averse to making political statements in its own Eurovision entries — as a number of analysts have observed, the Kremlin has long used Eurovision as a showcase of its geopolitical messaging, with Putin declaring Russia’s 2008 win as “not only a personal success for Dima Bilan, but one more triumph for all of Russia”.

Indeed, it is not difficult to trace Russia’s changing attitude to the West in its contest submissions. It is fascinating to reflect, when considering the Kremlin’s current attitude to questions of gender and sexuality, that in 2003 a West-leaning Russia entered the faux-lesbian band t.A.T.u as its entry, with Russian commentators laughing off the fact that its sexualised performances were banned on Top of the Pops and CD:UK as po-faced Western puritanism.

Today, we can say the poles have been reversed: it is the West that leans into displays of homoerotic sexuality, while t.A.T.u’s singer Yulia Volkova stood as a candidate for Putin’s United Russia party. Indeed, analysts have taken Russian state media’s highly negative reaction to the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst’s 2015 victory — the year following Russia’s criminalisation of “homosexual propaganda” — as a significant turning point in the Kremlin’s conservative turn. As the serious EU analysis paper Strategic Communications from the East observes: “Moscow, supported by state media outlets such as Ria Novosti and RT, used the triumph of the transgender candidate as an opportunity to emphasise Russia’s moral superiority over the West,” accentuating a cultural and geopolitical pivot leading us to the war in Ukraine.

Similarly, Russia’s use of non-ethnic-Russian singers like the Ukrainian singer Anastasiia Prikhoďko, who performed in a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, has been theorised as Moscow’s display of a nostalgic pan-Soviet solidarity encompassing countries which may themselves prefer to evade Moscow’s bearhug. Similarly, choices like its 2012 entry of ethnic Udmurt babushkas from the depths of the Urals baking bread and dancing in traditional folk dress express not only an increasingly-inward-looking cultural conservatism, but also an outward-facing performance of Russia as a harmoniously multi-ethnic empire, which as the academic Emily D. Johnson notes, “like classic Soviet internationalist propaganda, cast Russia as potentially more committed to diversity, tolerance, cooperation, and peace than key geopolitical opponents”.

Yet “perhaps, given the potential alternatives,” Johnson remarks, “we should feel grateful when Russia chooses to employ the nostalgic vocabulary of Soviet-style multiculturalism in staging itself for Eurovision. There are certainly scarier alternatives.” What are we to make, after all, of the fact that Russia’s last entry before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, “Russian Woman”, though outwardly an expression of formulaic feminist messaging, featured a stirringly anthemic bridge where the screen displayed a mournful Mother Russia watching over clashing armies as the stage erupted into jets of flame? At the song’s conclusion, the Tajik singer Manizha exhorted the audience, “Are you ready for change? Because we are — we are the change!” Europe was not, as we have learned, ready for the change that Moscow was planning.

Just as Russia’s enforced absence from the contest since the invasion — an exclusion not imposed after the 2014 conflict — dramatically symbolises the revisionist giant’s expulsion from the European family, so does the ongoing conflict over Israel’s inclusion this year symbolise dramatically shifting European attitudes to the country’s moral values. As the introduction to the 2007 collection of essays on Eurovision, A Song for Europe, observes, “Modernity characterises the ideal of post-war Europe to which the Eurovision Song Contest provides literal and figurative access: a society that is democratic, capitalist, peace-loving, multicultural, sexually liberated and technologically advanced.”

As we have seen, however, it also highlights the precise opposite, as the contest, like the continent’s politics, has been drawn eastward, embedding the stagey kitsch in a world of geopolitical rivalry, a disengagement from cosmopolitan internationalism and a return to traditional values, in which expansively imperial and ethnic particularist understandings of national selfhood have battled to assert themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the flag-waving crowds. The battle over Israel’s participation is then, less a breach of Eurovision’s stated values than the crystallisation of its actual ones. Like Saladin’s assessment of the meaning of Jerusalem at the end of Kingdom of Heaven, when we ask ourselves what Eurovision means, the answer is surely “Nothing… and everything”.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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