Status Updates From Postwar Europe and the Euro...

Although it was always more of a symbol rather than a catalyst for political change, the ESC’s constancy has made the contest an ideal eye for taking a synonymous ‘broad view’ of the developments in the history of postwar Europe that magnifies the interconnectedness between its citizens, cultures and states. All of which has made the ESC the concert of Europe of the postwar era.

The ESC could not bring democratic change to Europe, and while it continued to be interpreted as a symbol of European values, it still really functioned according to a combination of commercial motivations and the realpolitik of Europe’s international relations.

Nonetheless, there were also politically and socially engaged songs in the ESC after 1989 that showed that the ESC could function as a forum for shaping the ‘European values’ that the EU sought to forge. The irony was, however, that such engaged songs usually represented states that were not EU members.

Although the EBU continues to define itself as apolitical, that its membership is also determined by that of the CoE, which has political criteria for membership, now makes it explicitly otherwise.

For Central and East European states, especially if they were newly independent and relatively small, the ESC gave them a rare opportunity to affirm their international recognition and fashion their post-communist national identities in the eyes of hundreds of millions of Europeans.

"As the ESC was conceptualized from its beginning as a competition between states, it always reflected both national politics within these states as well as the bilateral relations between them."

Female singers have never been underrepresented in the ESC as in other professions: they have always outnumbered, and won more than, male ones in the contest, although they have been less numerous as conductors, composers and lyricists.

The EBU did for national broadcasting organizations what the EC did for states: as the historian Alan S. Milward argues, the ‘evolution of the European Community since 1945 has been an integral part of the reassertion of the nation-state as an organizational concept’, economically and politically buttressing states after the destruction of the Second World War.

Although the ESC adopted public televoting in 1997, the fact that it in 2009 reintroduced an element of expert jury voting alongside the public televote reflects a distrust of direct democracy that is also evident in the technocratic approaches of the EU.

(...) the ESC has offered the broadest number of people in the most states in Europe the opportunity to vote in a common event since the introduction of public televoting in the late 1990s. The results of Europe’s biggest election allow us to analyse interactions and sympathies in a broader context of diasporic, post-colonial, regional, religious and sexual identities.