By Manuela Achilles
Few scholars have done more than Dean Vuletic to place the Eurovision Song Contest within the broader history of postwar Europe. He is the author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest[1] (Bloomsbury, 2019, 2026)—the definitive history of Eurovision and its political and cultural significance, the second edition of which will soon be available. For this special focus in GlobalEurope, we spoke with him ahead of the contest’s seventieth edition about Eurovision’s origins, the major phases of its development, and the pressures created by recent controversies over war, participation, values, and belonging.
You are often referred to as “Professor Song Contest.” What first drew you to Eurovision, and when did it become a subject of serious scholarly inquiry for you?
That nickname was given to me by the Austrian public broadcaster, Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), in 2015, when I was based in Vienna. At the time, I held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship to research the history of Eurovision and to write the first scholarly monograph on the subject. I was very fortunate to have that grant and to be based at the University of Vienna just as Austria was hosting Eurovision, following the bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst’s victory for Austria in 2014. From around that time I have regularly been involved in media commentary on the contest.
My interest, however, goes back much further. I was born and raised in Australia to Croatian parents. Australia has a public-service broadcaster called SBS, the Special Broadcasting Service, which was created to serve multilingual migrant communities from non-English-speaking backgrounds. At that time, this meant primarily Southern European communities: Croatian, Greek, Italian, Maltese, and Portuguese. Through SBS, Eurovision was broadcast in Australia from 1983, which was quite remarkable from a global perspective. When I first watched it as a child, I was immediately captivated by the music and the different languages on stage. I was learning Italian at school, and the Italian entries in particular impressed me; I still regard them as among the strongest in the contest. Later, after studying European Studies at the Australian National University, I came to see that Eurovision is more than popular entertainment. It can be analyzed seriously as a lens through which to understand the politics, culture, and identity of Europe.
You are currently preparing a new edition of your history of Eurovision. A decade after the book’s publication, what have you had to reconsider or newly emphasize? Does the new edition change your original argument, or does it primarily bring it up to date?
The core argument remains intact, that Eurovision has always reflected and been intertwined with the political history of postwar Europe, but the new edition brings the narrative forward and allows me to situate turning points in the contest’s history. I mentioned Conchita Wurst earlier, and in a new chapter her victory marks the beginning of a new phase in which artists and entries became much more socially and politically engaged than before. It is also the point at which Eurovision became more deeply embroiled in global cultural wars.
In broader terms, I still distinguish between a Cold War phase and a phase of European unification. But within that framework, the turning points now stand out more clearly. I would identify a first period from 1956 to 1974, followed by 1975, when national juries began awarding their top ten entries points on an ascending scale of 1 to 8, 10 and 12, and the voting system was consequently stabilized after several different previous attempts. Then 1989–90 marked another major shift, with Yugoslavia’s victory as the first by an Eastern European country and the contest being staged in Zagreb after the end of the Cold War. The 1990s brought expansion into Central and East Europe, but also growing commercialization. From 2001 to 2012, a series of wins by Central and East European countries, including Estonia, Ukraine, Serbia, Russia, and Azerbaijan, prompted new political and economic challenges for the contest. From 2014 onward, with Conchita Wurst’s victory, we entered the more openly politicized phase, which the new edition emphasizes.
Eurovision is often linked to the broader story of postwar European integration. But how did the contest actually begin? How, if at all, was it connected to Europe’s emerging political cooperation?
The answer here is quite clear: Eurovision was not directly connected to this cooperation. It was a project of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which remains an independent association of national public-service broadcasters from Europe and the Mediterranean rim. One of the EBU’s major goals was to develop the new technology of television, and Eurovision emerged directly from that technical ambition. In 1954, a Eurovision network was established to foster program exchange and cooperation in television among the members of the EBU, and that is where the contest got its name.
The first contest in 1956 was essentially an experiment: could the EBU broadcast the same live program simultaneously across several European states? There was no political agenda, and certainly no explicit commitment to European integration. Having worked extensively in the Eurovision archives, I can say with confidence that its initiators did not conceive of it as a political project. They wanted to test a television format and enrich the programming of the Eurovision network with a popular song competition. It was modeled on the Sanremo Italian Song Festival, which had begun in 1951 and which RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, presented as a model worth following because it was popular. That is why I find it historically misleading when commentators describe Eurovision as a peace project born directly from the ruins of the Second World War. The war had ended in 1945, and by 1956 the Cold War was already well underway.
The European Broadcasting Union continues to frame Eurovision as politically neutral, yet participation and performance often carry obvious political meanings. How do you understand that tension?
The key point is that the EBU itself is a non-political organization and that Eurovision was established as a technical rather than a political initiative. That said, political meaning is not something that can be fully controlled. It is interpreted differently by different actors and audiences. What the EBU has attempted to do over time is to manage political expression rather than suppress it altogether. In fact, a certain degree of political resonance tends to make Eurovision more compelling. In a media landscape saturated with song contests, Eurovision remains distinctive because it is European and because it carries meaning beyond entertainment alone.
What, in your view, makes Eurovision “European”? Does it primarily stage national differences, or does it also help to create a genuinely European public?
In my research, I have watched every contest, analyzed every song, and studied the biographies of all of the artists. What emerges very clearly is a set of shared social and political experiences that were reflected in the entries. In Western Europe, these included postwar prosperity, social transformation, and technological change. Songs also dealt with sexual liberation and, later, environmental issues, beginning with the West German entry “Diese Welt” (This World) in 1971. Travel appeared as well, especially in the era of rising prosperity, as more northerners were going south for Mediterranean holidays. Already in 1961, Norway’s Nora Brockstedt sang “Sommer i Palma” (Summer in Palma), about having a summer romance in the Spanish city of Palma de Mallorca. These common experiences were expressed in lyrics and performance styles. Eurovision also served as a conduit for shared musical trends across borders. It was both a reflection of these shared developments and a channel through which they were promoted. I would not call these cultural values yet. The better term is cultural fashions.
Today, Eurovision is the largest cultural event that brings Europeans together on a single occasion. There is no comparable example of a cultural event that draws such a large European audience to consume the same product at the same time and vote on it. This is why I describe Eurovision at the beginning of my book as Europe’s biggest election. While the jury votes are still declared nationally, the public vote is now announced by entry rather than by country, which reinforces the impression of a collective European electorate. This balance is crucial. National competition makes the contest exciting; people enjoy supporting “their” entry. But Eurovision’s distinctive feature is that audiences cannot vote for entries representing their own country. This compels them to engage with other entries and, by extension, with other Europeans. That is where the European mindset comes into play.
Eurovision is often presented as a story of diversity and inclusion. Does that characterization still hold, and has its meaning changed over time?
From the very first contest in 1956, when West Germany was represented by a Holocaust survivor, diversity has been present. The first Israeli singer appeared for Austria in 1963, and Black performers were also visible during that decade. What has changed is how diversity and inclusion are understood today. Contemporary debates tend to focus on gender and sexual identities, and these debates often unfold at the national level. In some countries, LGBTQ+ representation is uncontroversial; in others, it remains highly contested or even impossible. Eurovision often reflects national political and cultural contexts rather than a single, uniform European position on diversity and inclusion.
Diversity in Eurovision has also been about language. Linguistic diversity has been one of Eurovision’s defining features from the beginning. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was generally expected that a song would be performed in the national language of the country it represented. There was a brief experiment in the mid-1970s when that principle was relaxed, but it was later reinstated. In the 2000s, however, English became increasingly dominant in the contest. This was also the period in which Conchita Wurst won and other queer acts became more visible. So the meaning of diversity has changed over time, but it has also narrowed at certain moments.
Recent contests have taken place in the shadow of Russia’s war against Ukraine and controversies surrounding Israel’s participation during the war in Gaza. Do these developments represent a new crisis for Eurovision, or do they reveal tensions that have always been present?
Every year I am asked whether the current contest is “the most political Eurovision ever.” In Malmö in 2024, there were demonstrations against Israel, and I recalled that only a few years earlier, when the contest was held in Tel Aviv, there had also been calls for a boycott. Similar claims about Eurovision were made then. The point is that political tensions have always accompanied Eurovision. During the Cold War, Eastern Bloc countries were excluded. The 1960s saw protests against the participation of Portugal and Spain, which were under right-wing dictatorships. Austria boycotted the 1969 contest in Madrid under Francisco Franco. In the mid-1970s, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus led Greece and Turkey to withdraw because of each other’s participation in the contest. What has changed in the last decade is the intensity and visibility of these conflicts, largely because Eurovision has become a global media event and because social media has enabled rapid mobilization around political causes.
Australia’s participation has raised broader questions about globalization and Europe’s boundaries. What does Australia’s case tell us about what Eurovision is—and what it is not?
Australia is a special case because of SBS, which cultivated a Eurovision audience before the country formally participated. Its inclusion also aligned with broader attempts to expand the Eurovision brand globally by using Australia as a potential gateway to initiatives such as Eurovision Asia, which will have its inaugural edition later this year. Most of the global spin-offs, though, have failed to gain traction. Proposed contests in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Canada have not materialized, and the American Song Contest in 2022 lasted only one season. There are already many international song contests on other continents, which makes it difficult to see what added value a Eurovision franchise would really bring. Eurovision’s enduring appeal lies in its identity as a European event; as I have already mentioned, it is the largest cultural event in Europe. By going global, Eurovision may risk undermining the very qualities that make it distinctive.
Russia has promoted Intervision as an alternative to Eurovision. How should we understand that relationship historically?
When Russian officials describe Intervision as a revival, that is historically inaccurate. Intervision was originally staged in the 1960s and 1970s by Czechoslovak and Polish broadcasters and was conceived as a project to bring East and West together. In other words, Intervision was an initiative of the Czechoslovaks and the Poles. It was never a Soviet- or Russian-led project during the Cold War. In the 1970s, it had global ambitions and served, in part, to present Poland as more liberal and open than other parts of the Eastern Bloc. The Intervision organized by Russia in 2025 was something quite different. It was very obviously designed as a challenge to Eurovision, presenting itself as a supposedly more “family-friendly”—that is, non-LGBTQ+—contest centered on “traditional” values. The presence of speeches by figures such as Sergey Lavrov and Vladimir Putin underscored its political character. The public did not vote. It was, altogether, a less compelling imitation of Eurovision, although the production values were quite impressive.
Eurovision has now lasted for seven decades. What has allowed it to endure, and what do you see as its greatest challenge moving forward?
Eurovision endures because it remains the most significant event uniting Europeans. We have no other example of a cultural event that brings together so many Europeans around the same cultural product and the process of voting. In an increasingly crowded media environment, its distinctiveness depends on maintaining its Europeanness—culturally, politically, and symbolically. This is both its greatest challenge and its greatest strength. Eurovision demonstrates that Europe can create and sustain a successful cultural product that speaks to its histories, cultures, and citizens. In doing so, it continues to articulate Europe’s place in an increasingly multipolar world.
To conclude on a personal note, is there one song or performance that remains especially memorable to you—one that captures what makes Eurovision matter?
For me, the German entry in 2018, Michael Schulte’s “You Let Me Walk Alone,” stands out. It is a song about his parents and about the loss of his father. Hearing it performed in the arena was deeply affecting, particularly for those of us who have experienced similar loss. Moments like that capture what makes Eurovision matter: the emotional resonance and the personal stories that connect audiences across borders.
This interview is based on a conversation recorded on March 20, 2026, and has been edited for publication.
Dean Vuletic is a historian of contemporary Europe who specializes in the Eurovision Song Contest, including as a prominent media commentator and public speaker. He began teaching the world’s first university course on Eurovision at New York University; as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellow at the University of Vienna, he then led a groundbreaking research project on the history of Eurovision. He holds a PhD in modern European history from Columbia University.
Manuela Achilles is Professor of German and History at the University of Virginia and Director of the Center for German Studies. She works on Weimar democracy, fascism, Holocaust memory, and sustainability; recent publications include Invisible Fatherland: Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and Nazis into Victims: Holocaust Fiction without Perpetrators (literaturkritik.de, 2024).
[1] More information about Dean Vuletic’s book here. Available July 2026 (EBook available April 2026).
