Performing the 'New' Europe

Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest

K. Fricker, M. Gluhovic, K. Fricker, M. Gluhovic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137367983
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This fascinating and lively volume makes the case that the Eurovision Song Contest is an arena for European identification in which both national solidarity and participation in a European identity are confirmed, and a site where cultural struggles over the meanings, frontiers and limits of Europe are enacted.

Part I

Feeling European: The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Public Sphere

1

‘Sharing the Moment’: Europe, Affect, and Utopian Performatives in the Eurovision Song Contest

Marilena Zaroulia

Zagreb, 1990: ‘Unite, Unite, Europe!’

One of my earliest memories of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is from the 1990 contest in Zagreb, when I first heard Italy’s winning song, ‘Insieme: 1992’ (‘Together: 1992’). The first line was delivered a capella: ‘Insieme, unite, unite Europe!’ Then the first piano notes were heard and Toto Cutugno with eyes closed, tightly holding his hands, sang a ballad pleading for togetherness in a united Europe. As the melody kept building and the backing vocals joined the lead singer, I felt a sudden rush in my body, an incomprehensible and growing feeling of elation, and by the time I heard the chorus lines I was so excited that I found myself singing with tears in my eyes. Listening to the Italian song had deeply affected me: it had caused a bodily, subjective reaction (the rush) that was subsequently transformed into an emotional, socially readable one (the tears).

What might appear as a naïve and embarrassing recollection from my childhood provides an appropriate starting point for this article, which aims to investigate the affective reactions that Eurovision provokes, while probing the politics that underpin such responses. In an attempt to understand the complex interrelation between Europeanness, affect, and politics as manifested in the contest, this chapter sets out to study three Eurovision moments, which coincide with shifts in the politics of the European Union (EU) and experiences of European consciousness since 1989, studying a period that started with the celebration of a united Europe coming into being in the years leading to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and finishing with the post-2008 socio-political, economic, and institutional crises in the EU. By analysing these moments – Zagreb, 1990; Oslo, 2010; Düsseldorf, 2011 – I also map my different experiences as a spectator of the ESC, tracing how each moment adds layers to my process of European identification.

The chapter builds on the important work of Italian historian Luisa Passerini, who has historicized representations of Europe and interrogated various aspects of European consciousness and belonging beyond Eurocentric essentialism. She has argued for a critical position towards European heritage, while emphasizing the need for a new approach to the question of Europe, beyond symbols and myths that have historically shaped definitions of Europeanness. I follow her argument that ‘one cannot define oneself as European without questioning not only one’s cultural heritage, ... but also one’s intimate feelings and attitudes’ (2002: 27). Hence, a comprehensive analysis of Europe and European identities requires a new conceptualization of the relation between the individual and collectivity: the term ‘identity’ is replaced with ‘identification’, and an engagement with subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and their affective dimensions offers further insight into the complex experience of Europeanness.

Passerini’s proposition (2007: 98) that processes of identification ‘are part of a broader process of subjectivation, by which one becomes the subject of one’s life in a given time and place’ frames the present analysis. That brief moment of listening to ‘Insieme’ added to the shaping of my subjectivity, as I experienced through feeling – possibly for the first time – a sense of belonging to a community larger than the Greek nation, thus making a first step towards identifying myself not only as a Greek but also as a European subject. Thus on that evening of 5 May 1990 in my family’s house in Athens, a significant aspect of my subjectivity was coined through an affective interconnection between national and European identification. The present chapter, written between January 2011 and September 2012, a period of tension in Greece–EU relations, questions how this layering of national and European identification has informed ways of watching the contest across the three Eurovision moments as well as critical analysis of such affective reactions.

The chapter does not study in detail specific Greek acts but, particularly in its final part, questions how the socio-political and institutional crises following International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU interventions and austerity measures introduced by Greek governments since May 2010 have had an impact on my Greek-European identification and subsequent analyses of the ESC. Having grown up in Greece during the 1990s – when the calls for the country’s modernization and Europeanization were widely accepted as necessary steps for its prosperity – but living and working in the UK since the early 2000s, my process of subjectivation has shifted and is defined by an inside/outside sense of belonging. Apart from shaping a different set of ‘strategies, alliances and loyalties’, this inside/outside notion of belonging further complicates processes of ‘affective investment’ (Passerini, 2007: 98), which cannot be read as a static condition of nationhood but instead emerges as an intersubjective relation with the national and other communities beyond it. In short, an inside/outside perspective, often precipitated by geographic displacement and shaped by encounters with various identity groups, corresponds to the complex layering of subjectivity, whereby national or European identification is only one of the experiences shaping a subject.

Emotionally rich moments, such as the one that I had at the age of ten, certainly appear in the personal narratives of a number of people who grew up watching the ESC. The feelings that might emerge among audiences – either inside the arena or among the TV viewers – can be easily deconstructed, for they are often permeated by problematic ideological positions about nationhood and might manifest what Michael Billig has defined as ‘banal nationalism’ (1995). Without dismissing such criticisms of the ideological premises of audiences’ feelings, this chapter follows Erin Hurley’s argument that affect operates as ‘a supplement to meaning that also undoes meaning’ (2011: 149) and thus proposes that what might emotionally move us in the context of the Eurovision cannot and should not be ignored. As emotion constitutes ‘a form of cultural politics and world making’ (Ahmed, 2004: 12), the ESC’s affective and ideological dimensions should not be perceived as polar terms of a binary opposition but as complementing perspectives for a comprehensive reading of the contest and its audiences.

Such a methodology is imperative for reading moments when the experience of national belonging, which lies at the heart of the competition, overlaps with or is followed – even momentarily – by an affiliation to a concept broader than the nation, a feeling European sensibility. In those moments of ‘emotional labour’ (Hurley, 2011: 28), a subject does not ‘possess something defined as an identity, but rather it is the subject who is possessed’ (Passerini, 2007: 98). Can such moments when one is ‘possessed’ by strong feelings of belonging to a collectivity capture the possibility of a meaningful European public sphere? If ‘our very identification with Europe’, as Passerini argues, ‘remains to be defined’ (2007: 101), since it is constantly reinvented, could an examination of structures of feeling as produced, capitalized, and reflected on the Eurovision stage provide new insights into what Europe can be in the 21st century, while indicating other forms of European identification beyond institutional bodies such as the EU?

Before I turn to the second historical moment that this chapter studies, I would like to attempt a provisional reading of my childhood memory, acknowledging certain ideological and political factors that might have influenced my reaction in 1990. In doing so I aim to provide a framework for that intense, personal moment: a framework that was shaped by both national and international reasons, which have defined Greece’s European identity since 1990 and which are pertinent for an understanding of the emotions that have surfaced in Greece as a consequence of the 2010–2012 crises, which I will discuss in the chapter’s third part.

During the 1990 ESC, hosted for the first and last time by Yugoslavia, a number of songs contained overt references to Europe and the European future in the aftermath of the watershed 1989. The Austrian and Norwegian songs were direct responses to the fall of the Iron Curtain, while the Irish song, ‘Somewhere in Europe’, although ostensibly narrating a love story, presented a journey through a number of landmark places across Europe. Ireland’s entry, which finished second, could be read as a celebration of a borderless Europe, an emerging reality or at least an aspiration after 1989. ‘Insieme’, a ballad overtly celebrating the post-Cold War united Europe vision, articulated the period’s zeitgeist of Europhilia, while 12 European countries were preparing for the Maastricht Treaty.

Hence the 1990 ESC captured a turning point in European history where international relations appeared no longer determined by the intense divisions of the Cold War. As Vuletic explains, this historical moment was broadcast live to Western and Eastern European audiences:

It was a pleasant coincidence that the only East European country in Eurovision won the Contest in the year that saw the fall of state socialism in eastern Europe, and the Zagreb contest was the first Eurovision that was broadcast directly to the other countries of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

(2007: 94)

The shifting international order was bringing about new questions regarding the position of nation states and the reconfiguration of national identities. Eric Hobsbawm, in Age of Extremes, provides the terms for a fuller comprehension of the key elements that defined this landmark period:

The end of the Cold War proved to be not the end of an international conflict but the end of an era: not only for the East, but for the entire world. There are historic moments, which may be recognized even by contemporaries, as marking the end of an age. The years around 1990 clearly were such a secular turning point. But, while everyone could see that the old had ended, there was utter uncertainty about the nature and prospects of the new.

(1995: 256)

Indeed, what Hobsbawm describes as a volatile background of anticipation defined a number of aspects of the socio-political and cultural milieux in Greece at the turn of the 1990s. The first years following the country’s accession as the tenth member of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1981 were marked by scepticism or hostility towards the EEC, partly because of the country’s vexed relations with countries of the European centre since the Second World War. However, by the end of the 1980s and largely due to the EEC’s growing economic support of the country, Greek public and political attitudes to European integration changed significantly. Susannah Verney has summarized this radical shift from Euroscepticism to the vision of European integration by juxtaposing two posters of the governing, socialist party for the European elections in 1984 and 1989. While in 1984 the poster depicted two arms – the Greek and the European – wrestling, in 1989 this struggle was replaced by a friendly, welcoming gesture:

The arm was being held out for a handshake and being used as a bridge for a representative sample of the Greek population to march towards united Europe and 1992 with their heads held high.

(Verney, 1993: 147)

The shifts in the international status quo as well as the positive reactions to these changes in Greece framed my reception of ‘Insieme’ and contributed to what I recall as an emotionally intense moment. Since the last months of 1989, I had been fascinated by the media’s representation of the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath. Furthermore, the proliferating narratives about Europe as a promise of growth for Greece and the rising public discourses framing 1992 as a magic year had captured my imagination.¹ Such representations and discourses shaped my process of identification as a Greek subject as bound up with the European vision. This bond between national and European identification was solidified in a spectacular and affective manner on the night I heard ‘Insieme’.

Nonetheless, the Europe that I identified with was incomplete. In problematic ways, official Greek discourses in the early 1990s used the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘EU’ as synonymous, although the Maastricht mission of European integration excluded nation states within the borders of the continent which did not participate in the EU mode of governance. At the age of ten I could not realize that the primary focus of the hegemonic EU project was the monetary union or how volatile the transition to the new international order would be for certain European countries, including Greece’s neighbours in the Balkans. Instead, the vague notion of an emerging European consciousness had an impact on my imagination, which produced an idealistic version of Europe: a community that inhabited an imagined space of togetherness, beyond geographical borders. My imagination of Europe was similar to that of scholars during the interwar period: like their Europe that became an object of love, a sign ‘of identification which go[es] beyond the affective investment for the places where we are born or live’ (Passerini, 2007: 109–110), my Europe, the Europe of ‘Insieme’, was a utopia, produced through representation and perpetuated through feeling.

Borrowing Sara Ahmed’s terms from her important study on what emotions do to the individual and collective body, psyche, and ideology, the feelings of excitement and joy generated by ‘Insieme’ did not ‘reside positively in the sign’; instead, the emotions associated with the Italian song operated ‘as a form of capital’ (2004: 45), reproduced through my reception of the performance while feeding back into my fascination for the European utopia, my version of the socioeconomic and political project for a united Europe. In Ahmed’s theory, emotions do not reside on a particular object but operate through an ‘affective economy’ (44); thus, at the turn of the 1990s, the value of a ‘European belonging’ sentiment grew through the circulation of cultural products, such as the ESC. My European utopia – limited and problematic though it was – was an outcome of this affective economy and exemplifies what Ahmed describes as a process of emotion-working that binds people together, and which is comparable to experiences of temporary community that emerge among audiences during the theatre or performance event.

In Theatre & Feeling, Hurley suggests that both affect, as the sensory, subjective reaction, and emotion, as the social manifestation of affect, are relational. In the context of theatre, feeling works by means of the intersubjective relation between performer and audience. This same principle applies to performances on the Eurovision stage. In the example of ‘Insieme’, the chorus lyrics ‘L’Europa non è lontana/C’ è una canzone Italiana per voi’ (‘Europe is not far away/This is an Italian song for you’) not only emphasized the intersubjective relation between performer and audience or TV viewer but, more importantly, moved beyond the competition’s national aspect, stressing its Europeanness through this direct address to the imagined, European community to which viewers – including me – could have felt that they belonged.

This ideal, European, imagined community appeared to exist beyond the us/them conundrum of national identity, even if this experience could only last for the three minutes of the song. The simultaneous reception of the Italian song by viewers across the continent was bound to instigate a sense of communion among them, an experience through simultaneity that is similar to Benedict Anderson’s theorization of the ‘kind of imagined community that is the nation’ (1991: 25). Imagining other people across Europe listening to the song at the same time with me had an impact on my reception of ‘Insieme’ and my sense of European belonging. However, this imagining not only indicates that Greece had managed itself to be included in the European integration mission but also suggests the contradictions that defined the unification process. While certain viewers, like me, may have felt part of the community that Cutugno was singing for, other viewers across Europe – in countries that were not yet EU members – may have felt excluded from this future of togetherness, thus being reminded of their status as ‘others’ in the emerging ‘new’ Europe of unity despite their desire to be recognized as Europeans. The contrast between my identification through song with other Europeans’ exclusion demonstrates the tensions that had marked European history since 1989 and ‘the possibility or impossibility of European unification’ (Balibar, 2004: 3). The question of who wishes and significantly can identify oneself as European and whether this necessarily implies EU membership has returned to prominence since the eruption of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, challenging hitherto comfortable intersections of national and European – as synonymous with the EU – identifications.

Some 20 years after ‘Insieme’ and in a context of emerging crisis, the European imagined community was again articulated through a performance designed to produce a shared, simultaneous, and emotionally intense experience in reception, this time during the non-competitive part of the ESC: in the flash mob dance ‘Glow’, the interval act of the 2010 Oslo contest, performed by Madcon, a Norwegian hip hop band, made up of Tshawe Baqwa and Yosef Wolde-Mariam. Both ‘Insieme’ and ‘Glow’ att...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Eurovision and the ‘New’ Europe
• Part I: Feeling European: The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Public Sphere
• Part II: European Margins and Multiple Modernities
• Part III: Gender Identities and Sexualities in the Eurovision Song Contest
• Bibliography
• Index