Eurovision is politics by other means
The Eurovision Song Contest is famous for its camp costumes and kitsch.
Contents
<p>On the evening of 24 May 1956, in the Teatro Kursaal in Lugano, Switzerland, seven European broadcasters held a small televised song competition and, in doing so, quietly enacted one of the stranger diplomatic experiments of the post-war continent. The winner was the host nation’s own Lys Assia, singing “Refrain” — in that first edition each country entered two songs, and the juries were even allowed to vote for their own — and hardly anyone watching imagined the thing would still be running seventy years later. Eurovision is famous now for camp costumes, key changes and voting blocs, which makes it easy to take as pure kitsch. It has always been that. It has also, from the first note, been politics conducted by other means.</p>
<h2 id="who-actually-started-it-and-why">Who actually started it, and why</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The contest did not spring from nowhere. Its direct model was the Sanremo Music Festival, running in Italy since 1951, and the proposal to build a pan-European version came from the Italian broadcaster RAI. The mechanism that made it possible was the European Broadcasting Union, the EBU, a professional alliance of national broadcasters founded in 1950. Within the EBU, a committee led by the Swiss broadcasting executive Marcel Bezençon shaped the idea into a workable competition, and the EBU’s General Assembly formally approved it in October 1955. The first contest followed the next spring.</p>
<p>The technical spur mattered as much as the cultural one. The EBU had recently built the “Eurovision” network — a shared system for relaying live television signals across national borders, first demonstrated in the mid-1950s. The song contest was, among other things, a showcase for that network: proof that a live picture could leave a studio in one country and appear, simultaneously, in living rooms in six others. The name “Eurovision” was originally the wiring, not the show.</p>
<h2 id="the-reconciliation-nobody-says-out-loud">The reconciliation nobody says out loud</h2>
<p>To understand why respectable broadcasters bothered, you have to sit in the year. The Second World War had ended barely a decade earlier, having killed on the order of 70 to 85 million people worldwide and left much of the continent physically in ruins. The broadcasters who met under the EBU banner in the mid-1950s came from countries that, within living memory, had been bombing one another’s cities.</p>
<p>The wider political project of the period was explicitly about binding former enemies together so tightly that war became impractical. The Council of Europe was founded in 1949 in Strasbourg; the French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, pooling the very industries — coal and steel — that fed armies; and by 1957 that logic would produce the European Economic Community, ancestor of the modern EU. Eurovision belongs on the cultural wing of exactly this effort. A song contest cannot pool an economy or guarantee a border, but it can put French, German, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Swiss performers on one stage voting on each other’s music, in public, every year, on live television. West Germany and France singing at one another rather than shooting at one another was not an accident of programming. It was the point, even if no one printed it in the running order.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-geopolitics-is-worth-taking-seriously">Why the geopolitics is worth taking seriously</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>There is a temptation to laugh Eurovision off as harmless froth, and much of it is. But dismissing its politics misreads what soft power is for. The whole apparatus of post-war European reconciliation rested on making cooperation feel ordinary — turning former adversaries into partners you saw so often that hostility became unthinkable. That is precisely the mundane, repeated, low-stakes contact that a mutual-defence and cooperation architecture is built to normalise, the same instinct that produced Europe’s overlapping security bodies, a subject explored in the argument that <a href="/story/nato-is-a-peacekeeping-organisation/">NATO functions as a peacekeeping organisation</a> rather than merely a war machine. Eurovision is that instinct set to a backing track: reconciliation you can hum.</p>
<p>Music has always carried more political charge than its defenders admit, and the contest inherits that charge whole. A song can smuggle a national grievance, a coming-out, a protest or a plea for solidarity past defences that a speech would never breach — which is why performers have so often used the stage to say something their governments would rather they did not. The history of the medium is full of artists who paid for exactly that, as the career of <a href="/story/sinead-oconnor-the-resounding-voice-of-a-rebel-songstress/">Sinéad O’Connor</a> demonstrated far from any contest stage. Eurovision merely institutionalises the tension: put a continent’s musicians in one room, hand out points, and you have manufactured an annual, televised argument about who Europe is.</p>
<h2 id="how-the-argument-shows-up-on-stage">How the argument shows up on stage</h2>
<p>The politics surfaces most visibly in the voting. Because juries and, later, public phone votes tend to reward familiar neighbours and shared languages, recognisable patterns emerge — the Nordic countries trading points, the Balkan states, the former Soviet republics — sometimes reflecting genuine musical affinity, sometimes plain diaspora and geography. Commentators call it bloc voting; the EBU periodically tweaks the rules to dilute it. What no rule change can remove is the underlying fact that when you ask nations to rank each other, they answer with more than musicology.</p>
<p>Then there are the moments when world events crash directly into the contest. Israel’s win in 1998 with Dana International, a transgender performer, was a cultural statement carried on a pop song. Ukraine’s victories have repeatedly arrived freighted with the country’s fraught relationship with Russia, most pointedly around the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of 2022, after which Russia was excluded from the contest entirely. The EBU insists the event is non-political and forbids overt political messaging on stage; the insistence itself is a tell. You do not need a rule against something that never happens.</p>
<h2 id="the-contest-as-a-mirror-of-a-widening-europe">The contest as a mirror of a widening Europe</h2>
<p>Watch the map of participating countries over seventy years and you are watching the political geography of the continent redraw itself. The first contest in 1956 had seven entrants, all from Western Europe. As the decades passed the field expanded — southern European democracies emerging from dictatorship in the 1970s, then, most dramatically, the flood of new entrants after 1989 as the Soviet bloc dissolved and its former members rushed to join the very Western institutions they had once been sealed off from. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania competed as independent states; so did Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Each new flag on the Eurovision stage marked, in miniature, a country’s arrival into a wider European conversation, and the contest became a rough barometer of who now counted themselves part of “Europe” — a category that has always been cultural and aspirational as much as strictly geographical.</p>
<p>The inclusion of countries well beyond the geographical continent underlines the point. Israel has competed since 1973 and won four times; Australia was invited in 2015. The boundary of “Eurovision” turns out to be defined not by coastlines but by membership of the EBU and a shared willingness to take part in the ritual. That elasticity is itself a political statement about what the club is for.</p>
<h2 id="the-kitsch-is-not-a-bug">The kitsch is not a bug</h2>
<p>None of this means Eurovision should be watched with a furrowed brow. The glitter, the wind machines, the improbable staging and the deliberate silliness are load-bearing. A po-faced Congress of European Broadcasters would have folded in a decade. The absurdity is what makes the annual ritual survivable and even beloved, and it is the sugar coating that lets the underlying project — everyone in one room, no one at war — go down without anyone feeling lectured. The daftness is the diplomacy’s disguise.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>In the very first contest in 1956, each country submitted two songs and the juries were permitted to vote for their own entries — a format so open to abuse it was never repeated.</li>
<li>“Eurovision” originally referred to the EBU’s cross-border television relay network, not the song contest; the show borrowed the name of the cabling that made it possible.</li>
<li>The contest’s direct inspiration was Italy’s Sanremo Festival, which predated it by five years and still runs today.</li>
<li>ABBA won Eurovision for Sweden in 1974 with “Waterloo” — a song named, with some cheek, after a battle — and used the exposure to launch one of the best-selling careers in pop history.</li>
<li>Russia was expelled from the contest in 2022 following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a decision the “non-political” EBU took precisely because the alternative would have been more political still.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="closing-reflection">Closing reflection</h2>
<p>The people who built Eurovision were not naïve enough to think a pop competition could prevent a war. What they seem to have grasped is subtler and more durable: that peace between former enemies is not held together by treaties alone but by the accumulation of small, ordinary, shared occasions until conflict starts to feel not just wrong but weird. Seventy years of dodgy key changes and staged pyrotechnics have quietly done that work — made a continent’s rivalries into an annual joke it tells together rather than a wound it reopens. That the whole thing looks ridiculous is, if anything, the most serious part of the design.</p>
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