The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is a unique television event by virtue of its long continuous history: this transnationally disseminated live television event was organised for the first time in 1956 and is still today (2019) arranged annually. Despite this unique character, the contest was for a long time neglected in academic research; it seems that it has been regarded as a decidedly mainstream phenomenon and thus deemed uninteresting. It may be noted that some of the earliest academic work on the ESC focuses on the tendencies of ‘bloc voting’ between different countries’ expert jurors or, more recently, voting television viewers; the voting figures in the contest were thus used as a source for data providing quantitative indicators of political or cultural affinities between European nations. After the turn of the millennium, however, a growing amount of research on the ESC has been published. Generally, the main focus of these works has been laid on the cultural and political importance of the contest, both in different national perspectives and in a European perspective (see, for instance, Raykoff and Tobin Reference Raykoff and Tobin2007; Tragaki Reference Tragaki2013). An important factor contributing to this increasing scholarly interest appears to be the significant changes in the ESC having taken place as a result of the political upheavals in Europe after 1989.

An analysis of the ESC from a cultural and political perspective is also the main focus of the present volume. Vuletic's account traces developments and changes throughout the entire history of the contest and is sustained by thorough historical research. The contest is one long-lasting result of the gradual development, in the post-World War II years, of national television services and their international co-operation frameworks. The organiser of the ESC, the European Broadcasting Union, was formed in 1950, but its roots were situated in international organisations set up in the early years of broadcasting: the International Broadcasting Union (formed in 1925) and the International Telecommunication Union (formed in 1932). Vuletic notes that the technological-administrative emphasis of these organisations implied that the ‘Europe’ defined by the European Broadcasting Union was originally not primarily a political entity, but ‘settled by geographical and technical considerations – particularly the remit of broadcasting signals – rather than cultural or political ones’ (p. 22). Nevertheless, the ESC has gradually come to accumulate a range of cultural and political meanings in relation to Europe and its nation states.

The overarching disposition of the book is shaped by its division into two chronologically organised main sections, covering the periods until 1989 and after 1989, respectively, titled ‘The Cold War, 1945–1989’ and ‘European Unification, 1990–2016’. The first part contains subsections dealing with the organisational origins of the ESC, its layout in terms of visual presentation and musical content in the early decades of the contest, and the relationship of the ESC to the broadcasting organisations and song contests of the eastern part of Europe during the years of the ‘iron curtain’. The second section, tracing developments after 1989, discusses the role of the ESC in a changing Europe, marked by wars and ambivalent attitudes to the project of European unity, and analyses the values celebrated in the ESC, which are indicated by the keywords ‘diversity’, ‘commercialism’ and ‘democracy’.

One of the central themes running through the book is the role of the ESC in various attempts at creating enabling conditions for a developing European identity, an aspect of the contest often emphasised in popular discourse on the event. This was not originally an intention behind the creation of the contest, and Vuletic points out that until the late 1970s it was not taken for granted that the contest would be arranged annually; the decision was taken from year to year. The political organisations aiming at furthering European unity only relatively recently took active measures to utilise the event for their purposes: ‘the EC [European Community] only started to become directly involved with the contest in the late 1980s after Brussels realised that it needed to develop a cultural policy that would promote a European identity’ (p. 19). On the other hand, the author provides ample evidence for the cultural and political significance the contest, and individual contest entries, at times have acquired in different national contexts, claiming that ‘television in Europe still remains a very national affair, as does popular music’ (p. 4). This, of course, has been particularly notable in the changing post-1989 political landscape of Europe, where emerging new nation states have made use of the ESC as an arena for the articulation of their national identities in relation to other European nations, the contest giving 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’ (p. 126).

Vuletic has comparatively little to say about the characteristics of the the ESC as a television production; the basic preconditions for the event, as a stage-entertainment show, featuring vocal performers and a large orchestra, transmitted live, for a long period of time imposed restrictions on what could be done in terms of any more media-specific ‘televisation’ of the music presented. However, after the turn of the millennium, thanks to the discarding of the live orchestra and technological developments within digital imaging, the ESC has provided several examples of an increasing emulation in a live context of the post-production effects of music video. The author describes this development in terms of an increasing ‘commercialisation'of the event, pointing out that economic factors are decisive for the extent to which visual special effects are used. He identifies the Nordic countries, Sweden in particular, as precursors in this process of commercialisation, claiming that in recent years, ‘the contest's organization has been dominated by the commercial ambitions and technological superiority of Europe's north’ (p. 7). Here, it seems, Vuletic's usage of the word ‘commercial’ repeats a not uncommon conflation of aesthetics and economics; although the ESC no doubt has gradually become a larger enterprise in purely economic terms, the tendencies he identifies might alternatively also have been described in terms of ‘medialization’ or ‘(public-service) professionalization’ rather than commercialisation.

A feature peculiar to the ESC well into the 1990s was the voting procedure, whereby a small group of ‘expert jurors’ in each participating nation awarded points to other nations’ entries. Although such expert-jury verdicts surprisingly often appear to have been accepted as ‘the proper view of the nation’, the introduction of public televoting in the contest in 1997, made mandatory in 1999, represented a significant increase in the democratic validity of the contest results: now these could arguably be taken to actually represent the views of the general European public, rather than a few experts. According to Vuletic, this change turned the ESC into ‘Europe's biggest election’ (p. 3). However, as he exemplifies, public televoting also appeared to increase the risk of tendencies towards ‘bloc voting patterns’ perceived by the organisers as problematic, and in 2009 the currently practised procedure, combining public televoting and expert-jury voting, was introduced. This, the author claims, ‘reflects a distrust of direct democracy that is also evident in the technocratic approaches of the EU’ (p. 13).

Having recurred annually for more than 60 years, the ESC has thus acquired a range of cultural and political meanings, far wider than implied by the nominal purpose of the programme format as a live entertainment show and audience-vote popularity chart. Vuletic writes in this connection of ‘the polysemy of the ESC, its different meanings for different states at different times: from an ideal forum for nation fashioning and European identity construction, to an expression of cultural homogenisation at the expense of national diversity’ (p. 151). With Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, he has produced a thorough analysis of this polysemy; the book presents a well-researched and exhaustive historical account of organisational and political matters in relation to the Eurovision Song contest, as well as an in-depth analysis of its cultural significance in a European perspective. Although providing a few minor causes for objection – for instance, this reviewer has some difficulty with Vuletic's usage of the genre label ‘Europop’ – the book as a whole constitutes a significant and valuable contribution to the understanding the interplay of popular music, media and cultural policy in post-World War II Europe.