Many things about today's Eurovision Song Contest might be far beyond what Marcel Bezençon, the Swiss broadcasting chief who first proposed that European Broadcasting Union (EBU) members should cooperate to produce common television programming in 1950, would have foreseen when the Eurovision Network began holding its own song competition. He almost certainly did not envisage that the event that started as a contest between seven broadcasters in a Lugano theater would become a three-night spectacular with almost as large a footprint as the sports tournaments whose arenas it now shares. Nor would he have anticipated it becoming a touchstone in the international politics of LGBTQ rights. He would not have expected the contest's list of participants to spread right across the former socialist space, beyond the Caucasus—or, looking back at how the EBU and Eastern European broadcasters did try to cooperate during the Cold War (one of the many myth-busting facts that Dean Vuletic's deft history brings to light), perhaps he might. In fact, seeing that until the late 1970s the EBU was still annually reconfirming whether to hold another Eurovision, he might be most surprised it was still running at all.

Eurovision has outlived many geopolitical and socioeconomic visions of what “Europe” means, where it starts and ends, and who belongs to it: the “Europe” of Cold War ideological divisions; the “Europe” of nations protecting their languages and leisure cultures against Americanization (which troubled broadcasters in both East and West); the “Europe” of ever-closer union and eastward enlargement; even the “Europe” of the global financial crisis (the first time gaps started reappearing in Eurovision's ever-growing map), leading into the uncertain time of populism and anticosmopolitan reaction in which Eurovision and its viewers find themselves today. Throughout this time, and especially since the end of the Cold War, its performances and production, plus the commentary and journalism around it, have offered scholars of media and culture sources for tracing the construction of national and European narratives of identity. Among these narratives, as Eurovision's history has shown remarkably often, are the myths of postwar European reconciliation and unity in diversity that have so frequently seemed to echo developments in the memory politics and cultural policy of the Council of Europe (CoE) and what would eventually become the European Union (EU).

One of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest’s major achievements, however, is to debunk the assumption that Eurovision has inevitably followed where European political integration led. The EBU and Europe's political institutions have, to be fair, often mirrored each other: the EBU was the first to turn the circle of twelve stars into a European symbol (by making it the Eurovision Network logo in 1954), and Eurovision's own eastward enlargement took its most transformative step forward (by adding a semifinal, guaranteeing each interested broadcaster a televised entry every year) in 2004, the year ten new states including eight former socialist countries joined the EU. But this was not the same thing as both organizations having common interests, let alone the same thing as every broadcaster who has helped to shape Eurovision also being invested in creating a unified European political community (an argument that poses something of a challenge to the school of Eurovision research inspired by what media and television sociologists have made of Benedict Anderson's ideas about national audiences becoming imaginable as a by-product of printing in the vernacular). Historically, the EBU has stayed aloof from the “supranational aims” of the EU and its predecessors, which would have been “politically divisive” among its members (32). Vuletic's archival research, using the collections of the EBU, the CoE, the EU, and several Central European national broadcasters, shows that the EBU was more comfortable cooperating with the intergovernmental CoE, when it did so at all, though the growing financial burden of the contest persuaded officials to accept limited sponsorship from the then–European Community (EC) between 1987 and 1990, that is, the years immediately after the 1986 Single European Act and the accession of Portugal and Spain. The themes of integration in late 1980s Eurovision were not, in other words, anticipating the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into Western European institutions at all—though it might have seemed that way in May 1990, when Yugoslavia (the only socialist country to have joined the contest) happened to host Eurovision after winning in 1989.

Another of this book's great strengths is its ability to put the history of Eurovision alongside the cultural politics of song contests in socialist Europe. Popular histories often contrast Eurovision, as the Western contest, with Intervision, its Communist rival in the East. In fact, Vuletic shows, the curtain between the two contests was more velour than iron: the International Radio and Television Network (OIRT), founded in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia in 1950, started rebroadcasting Eurovision in 1965 and was more open to Western European artists and broadcasters participating in its own Intervision contest (a format incorporated into editions of different annual song festivals in Prague, Bratislava, and Sopot) than the EBU. The OIRT had already expressed interest in its members joining Eurovision even before the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe meant its dissolution and the absorption of its members into the EBU. Intervision itself was far less Soviet than is typically supposed, testifying to how the USSR failed to become “a cultural superpower” in Central Europe and to a “cultural multipolarity” (98) that Vuletic (in common with other recent historians of state socialist television) suggests deserves more recognition. Vuletic's background as a historian of popular music in Yugoslavia—which reacted to Stalin's rejection of Tito by attempting to create a geopolitical identity independent of either superpower bloc and which joined Eurovision in 1961 as soon as its television infrastructure permitted—allows him to begin perceiving those complexities because they were the very stuff of which Yugoslavia's own cultural politics and foreign policy were made.

For Eurovision researchers, Yugoslavia's collapse into six successor states, and the emergence of Eurovision as a stage where they and other postsocialist countries (or rather their broadcasters) could perform symbolic “returns to Europe” under a European gaze, conventionally marks the point at which the contest entered the postâ Cold War era. This is ground that the extant literature has covered often; after the early 1990s, the archival sources that have provided such insights into the first half of Eurovision's history have less to say. The book's thematic organization also on occasion leaves the full context of particular individual moments (such as the Serbian singer Marija Šerifović’s win in 2007 with a heavily queer-coded performance, or Baku's controversial hosting of the contest in 2012) distributed across more than one chapter. Even if it is harder to write the history of Eurovision since the 1990s completely afresh, the book would be incomplete without bringing its narrative up to the present day. Its evidence about the period between the 1950s and 1980s, on the other hand, troubles several much-repeated myths and promises to reframe how historians conceive of what the contest has meant for the whole length of its existence, while showing how its meanings for Central and Eastern Europe, in particular, can be situated in the context of the history of European integration and in European media history as a whole.