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
31
K. Fricker et al. (eds.), Performing the ‘New’ Europe
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2013
32 Feeling European
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
Marilena Zaroulia 33
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
34 Feeling European
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
Marilena Zaroulia 35
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
36 Feeling European
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
Marilena Zaroulia 37
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’ attempted to represent a united Europe, particularly through
the songs’ lyrics. In performance, though, the 1990 song represented
38 Feeling European
the European community as absent, imagined, listening to the song in
‘homogeneous time’ (Benjamin qtd. in Anderson, 1991: 24), while the
singers portrayed a hegemonic image of an all-white, European, ‘authentic’
identity. In contrast, Madcon’s immigrant identities challenged that
dominant representation, allowing for a pluralistic image of Europe.
This celebration of difference in Europe through the performers’ mixed
backgrounds captures aspects of everyday life in contemporary, globalized
Europe and a desire for a European consciousness beyond any
discrimination. This emphasis on diversity also resonates with principles
that permeated the 1997 Amsterdam and 2001 Nice EU treaties
and the ‘united in diversity’ motto, launched in 2000, indicating how
often the ESC articulates EU priorities. It is impossible to determine
whether the ESC aims to stage the realities, aspirations or institutional
directives in contemporary Europe, or indeed who would make
such decisions, but, when attempting to read the contest’s reception,
it is crucial to remember this complex interplay between performance
and institutional contexts and how it might have an impact on the
audience’s feelings.
This chapter’s second section discusses the affective and ideological
dimensions of ‘Glow’, focusing particularly on how the ﬂash mob
might have contributed to the negotiation of Europe as utopia and the
key role of a dramaturgy of feeling, particularly what Jill Dolan (2005)
terms the ‘utopian performative’ – emotionally efﬁcacious moments
that invite us to reconsider performance’s social potential – in a new
stage of the European utopia, in the expanded EU of 27 member states.
The chapter further examines the representation of European imagined
and existing communities through the ﬂash mob and the potentiality
of multiple European public spheres. I ask how the performance
worked at an emotional level, proposing that an analysis of the affective
dimensions of ‘Glow’ might allow for a more comprehensive understanding
of Europe not as a geographical entity but as an elusive notion,
a utopia or, to quote Jacques Derrida, an ‘other heading’ (1992) with
a political impetus. In doing so, I wish to consider the problematics of
European belonging and propose that the ESC brieﬂy and in negative
terms provides us with insight into how European identiﬁcation could
be experienced through ﬂeeting encounters in the public sphere.
Oslo, 2010: ‘Sharing the Moment’
The ESC’s promotion is bound up with a discursive triangle of music,
sharing, and emotion, which is part of the wider ‘affective economy’
Marilena Zaroulia 39
that solidiﬁes the contest and the representation of a united Europe
through it. As this chapter focuses more on the European unity utopia
rather than the construction of national sentiments, it is necessary
to examine the interval act as a moment in the contest where panEuropean
feelings emerge. Furthermore, in recent years, the postcards –
short clips that introduce each act – as well as slogans, such as ‘Under
the Same Sky’ (Istanbul, 2004), ‘Conﬂuence of Sound’ (Belgrade, 2008),
‘Share the Moment’ (Oslo, 2010) and ‘Feel Your Heart Beat’ (Düsseldorf,
2011), encapsulate the affective strategies employed to produce a feeling
European sensibility.
Interval acts since 1990 can be classiﬁed into two groups. The ﬁrst
are those that celebrate the host nation’s identity while promoting a
version of ‘authentic’ national culture that can appeal to both national
and international audiences. Examples include ‘Riverdance’ in Dublin
(1994), which subsequently became a global sensation, and the appearance
of Goran Bregovi´c (Belgrade, 2008), who is famous for his collaborations
with other musicians in the Balkans. Furthermore, the interval
act in Athens (2006) narrated the history of 5000 years of Greek song,
employing dramaturgical strategies reminiscent of the 2004 Athens
Olympic Games’ opening ceremony, particularly with regard to the spectacular
representation of a linear historical narrative of the Greek nation
and its music.
The second kind of interval act celebrates a common European identity
and a culture of sharing through music. A good example is the
‘Musical Journey through Europe’ in the 2000 Stockholm contest. The
Swedish act, which in some ways is similar to the Norwegian ﬂash
mob, attempted to present Europe as a shared space of togetherness by
merging live, Swedish music and dance performances in the arena, and
recordings of music, dance, and everyday life in various countries across
Europe. In other words, the Stockholm act crafted an impression of the
local, Swedish culture as part of a larger European community portrayed
as a lived, everyday experience.
In this way the interval acts of the ESC share some commonalities
with a global spectacle like the Olympic Games. As Helen Gilbert and
Jacqueline Lo have observed in their discussion of the 2000 Sydney
Olympic Games, the opening ceremony is ‘designed not only to capture
the imagination of a vast media audience but also to present the
nation to itself through popular and allusive iconographies’ (2007: 1).
By means of sophisticated and carefully orchestrated representations
of national narratives and images alongside reﬂections of cosmopolitanism,
the Games’ ceremonies advocate a universalist principle of
40 Feeling European
togetherness, which neglects the existing, material conditions that frequently
cause divisions in the contemporary world. The ESC interval
act – as the moment in the contest where the national is portrayed
as part of the European – can be subject to a similar critique for
offering incomplete and romanticized versions of the enlarged, allinclusive
‘new’ Europe, ignoring tensions and conﬂicts in the Continent
and, sometimes, reproducing a hegemonic and totalizing narrative of a
united Europe that can be consumed by viewers but does not actually
exist.
Notwithstanding this valid critique of interval acts as partial representations
of contemporary Europe, I would like to investigate the
ﬂash mob’s affective power, questioning how it staged the European
utopia. ‘Glow’ is signiﬁcantly different from other interval acts that have
attempted to capture Europeanness, for it was not a mere representation
of contemporary Europe; as a ﬂash mob, it aspired to present the
Eurovision audiences with a possibility of participation in the contest
and, metaphorically, Europe.
Flash mobs appeared during the summer of 2003 in the US and soon
became a global phenomenon. Balancing between playful attitudes of
intervention in public spaces, particularly in urban areas, and ‘surfing
the line between legality and guerilla-like transgression as a means
of calling into question the validity of the former’ (Whybrow, 2010:
198–199), ﬂash mobbing has become ubiquitous in performance as well
as advertising campaigns. Despite claims to spontaneity, ﬂash mobs are
always meticulously planned, as ﬂash mobsters use cyberspace to coordinate
their performances. Crucially for this argument, though, ﬂash
mobs articulate a new version of the Habermasian public sphere, where
the boundaries between performer and spectator become porous. This
form of ‘surprise theatre’ ‘both responds to and encourages a culture
of perpetual spectatorship’ (Muse, 2010: 12) in the digitized age. Flash
mobs can be viewed as a celebration of mobilizing people, creating temporary
electronic communities as well as different kinds of ‘diffused
audiences’ (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998), both of the live and the
framed, online performance:
they use the very technologies that mitigate against the need for live
crowds in order to generate, ﬁrst, temporary live communities, and
then long-term virtual ones. They stage a digitally enabled in-yourface
revolt against the erosion of face-to-face interaction in a digital
nation.
(Muse, 2010: 12)
Marilena Zaroulia 41
As in Stockholm, the Oslo act was a composition of live and recorded
dance sequences in the arena and other places across Europe. The
novelty lay in the inclusion of Eurovision audiences/fans as performers
in the act: the ‘imagined European community’ that Cutugno addressed
in 1990 was now actually dancing in various European cities, ‘sharing
the moment’. Peter Svaar, head of press for the 2010 ESC, suggested that
the hosts wanted
to share the Eurovision Song Contest, rather than just broadcast it.
With 18,000 people live on location in Oslo dancing, plus video
footage of large ﬂash mob groups from ten major cities, the song,
the movements, the arena, and all the cities will share a common
musical experience together.
(qtd. in Bakker, 2010)
The Eurovision ﬂash mob, which is reminiscent of widespread volunteering
during the Olympic Games, added to the contest’s ‘affective
economies’. Via new technologies, the contest’s numerous fans were
called to volunteer and perform in an expanded Eurovision stage, in
their local contexts (Figure 1.1). ‘Glow’ enforced the participants’ sense
of ownership of the contest while, following Ahmed, the more widely
Figure 1.1 Flash mobbers perform ‘Glow’ as part of the 2010 ESC interval act
Source: EBU.
42 Feeling European
the dance circulated, the more affective it became and consequently
a stronger feeling European sentiment emerged. Participation triggered
the emotion-work that binds people together and produced a temporary
community. Further, like all performances that ‘ﬂash into being for a
few short minutes in a particular place [then] often continue to ﬂash
on screens around the world for months or years to follow’ (Muse,
2010: 9–10), ‘Glow’ produced a more permanent spectating community
potentially beyond European borders, as since the night of the Oslo ﬁnal
the act has been viewed online more than 3 million times.
On the night of the grand ﬁnal, as the ﬁrst notes of ‘Glow’ were heard,
the two performers walked across the arena approaching the stage.
Madcon’s appearance gave a sense of togetherness between performers
and the 18,000 spectators, which resonated with the song’s lyrics and
the promise of ‘a world connected’. As the two reached the front rows
of the audiences, the wave of ‘bow-arrow’ moves of the choreography
spread across the arena: the ﬁrst row of audiences started dancing and
then gradually the dance rippled across the arena. For eight minutes,
footage of Madcon and audiences dancing in the arena were rapidly
succeeded by recordings of groups of – predominantly young – dancers
in European cities. The recordings from the European cities were cut
into performances in the arena as Madcon were asking the audiences to
‘put their hands up’, not only to celebrate but presumably to participate
in the pan-European dance. Five minutes into the act a coup de théâtre
was staged, as images of Eurovision parties in each of the 39 participant
countries appeared on screen: families, couples, and pets were all
dancing to ‘Glow’.
Two decades after Zagreb, I was watching the ESC at my home in the
UK, not on TV but through Eurovision live broadcasting via the internet.
This time I was conscious that I was ‘sharing the moment’, the European
utopia of togetherness that I had ﬁrst encountered in my childhood, not
only with other Europeans but also with viewers across the world. This
was not simply a carefully crafted image of a united Europe, where the
borders between the private, the public, and the spectacular had collapsed;
‘Glow’ appeared to articulate a cosmopolitan disposition, which
was also evident in the song’s lyrics, and gestured to a global community
of viewers. The ESC was speaking to another layer of my subjectivity,
not only as a Greek or a European but also as a ‘citizen of the world’.
Nonetheless, the Norwegian act’s promise of a cosmopolitan Europe
vis-à-vis the impact of neoliberal ideologies in shaping (banal) cosmopolitanism
as well as models of European governance that limit the
space for citizens’ participation could only be met with scepticism. For
Marilena Zaroulia 43
me, the performance’s affective call could not overcome the ideological
limitations of a ‘cosmopolitan’ act on the Eurovision stage.
‘Glow’ aspired to instigate emotion through the intersubjective
moments produced between performers and audiences in the arena,
audiences in the various cities and future audiences of the recorded
ﬂash mob dance. Hence ‘Glow’ was produced by a speciﬁc European
community – Eurovision fans – but was constructed in a way that
attempted to reach wider European and global publics. To borrow a term
from Dolan’s fascinating study of Utopia in Performance, ‘Glow’ could
‘ripple out’: the dance seemed to literally spread across European cities
and households, provoking emotion to the viewers while the dance’s
affective dimensions could permeate ‘other forms of social relations’
(Dolan, 2005: 34). Furthermore, the community shaped among the various
kinds of performers and audiences of ‘Glow’ bear the potentiality
of ‘rippling out’, extending into the future.
The concept of potentiality is important for a discussion of the
links between Europe as utopia, emotion, and Eurovision dramaturgies.
According to José Estaban Muñoz’s reading of utopia in queer
performance,
Potentialities have a temporality that is not in the present but, more
nearly, in the horizon, which we can understand as futurity. Potentiality
is and is not presence, and its ontology cannot be reduced to
presentness ... It is something like a trace or potential that exists or
lingers after a performance.
(Muñoz, 2009: 99)
Potentiality as a critical framework complicates the deﬁnition of temporality
in Norway’s interval act. The ﬂash mob dance and the moment
that was shared by performers and audiences transcended clear temporal
distinctions of past and present while gesturing towards a future. Thus
the 2010 ESC could be approached as an engagement with the notion
of Europe not only in the present tense but also in terms of what might
happen after the contest, in terms of the acts’ potentiality, of what is
here but not entirely there until we move to the future. A principle of
presence and not presence permeated the ﬂash mob’s dramaturgy as it
travelled across European cities, living only a trace while progressing to
the next location.
A link between the ﬂash mob, potentiality, and the Derridean
approach to Europe can be made here. This link, although ostensibly
working on philosophical grounds, can offer a valuable position about
actual crises in Europe, which are reﬂective of divisions in the Eurozone,
44 Feeling European
since certain countries are established as key players in the EU’s ﬁnancial
policies while others are perceived as potential contaminators of Europe.
These tensions, though, expose a more fundamental rupture in the EU
ediﬁce: the failure of plans for a common European constitution during
the 2000s and the absence of a European civil society. In short, a united
Europe ‘sharing the moment’ does not exist through EU institutions,
which have failed to create an appropriate framework for a meaningful
European public sphere.
However, a performance like the ﬂash mob and the feelings it instigated
bear the potentiality of indicating another way towards this
European unity utopia, which is closer to the Derridean reading of
Europe as ‘im-possibility’. This ‘im-possible’ does not signify resignation;
instead, it is what gives ‘the very movement to desire, action and
decision: it is the very ﬁgure of the real. It has its hardness, closeness and
urgency’ (Derrida, 2005: 131). In The Other Heading and other writings
about Europe since the 1990s, Derrida read Europe as a manifestation of
the à-venir – as the future and what is yet to come – and an event, which
is based on ‘a condition of impossibility’ (Derrida, 2005: 90). Proposing
a radical redeﬁnition of the European beyond Eurocentricism and
allowing a true engagement with the ‘other’, ‘which is not, never was,
and never will be Europe’ (1992: 77), Derrida responded to the European
unity promise – that marked my childhood – in deconstructive terms.
Although he did not oppose the European utopia per se, he radically
challenged the homogeneity that the EU integration vision implied and
emphasized the distinction between ‘the im-possible’ and utopia as a
term that he was ‘wary of’, although it ‘has critical powers that we
should probably never give up on’ (2005: 131).
Signiﬁcant for the purposes of my argument here is that Europe is
constantly deferred, at a temporal and geographical distance; it bears
the potentiality of a future, which might never emerge, but within this
deferral lies its utopian quality. The Derridean Europe, as approached
in his talk ‘A Europe of Hope’ in 2004, shortly before his death, is a
‘call’ (Naas, 2008: 93) that can shape a direction to the future. Although
the ﬂash mob was rehearsed and edited, and ‘arrived’ on the screens
of European audiences on the night of the contest, the experience of
European togetherness and participation that it sought to capture can
be read in a Derridean fashion, as an experience that is yet to arrive
and at the same time incomplete and impossible to arrive. In other
words, the ﬂash mob was an appropriate strategy to brieﬂy articulate
Europeanness as an im-possible principle while indicating how multiple
communities can shape public spheres through shared, embodied
Marilena Zaroulia 45
experiences of participation and affective moments of identiﬁcation,
thus paving the way towards that European im-possibility. In this way,
the Derridean approach to impossibility offers a framework for analysing
the ﬂash mob’s performance efﬁcacy while responding to sociological
debates (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 168–183) about the form that a
European civil society, beyond the EU, can or might take. Unlike the
romanticized European utopia I had imagined in 1990, the 2010 act
rejected a static vision of unity misrepresented by institutional bodies,
offering instead a passing image of what Europe could be like if more
spaces were available for subjects to come together as public in diverse
and creative ways.
‘Glow’ negotiated the relation between present and future, the
utopian and the impossible, through emotion, generating ‘utopian
performatives’, which are imbued by a transformative quality for audiences.
According to Dolan, utopian performatives are
small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention
of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the
present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every
moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous,
aesthetically striking and intersubjectively intense.
(2005: 5)
Following Dolan’s argument, these intense, emotional experiences of
community and intersubjectivity during performance might transform
into principles of action in the public sphere. Utopian performatives
articulate ‘affective and ideological doings ... [which] also critically
rehearse civic engagement that could be effective in the wider public
and political realm’ (2005: 7); in this way, the utopian performative
momentarily bridges present and future. Certain moments in the performance
clearly expressed a desire for an elsewhere: audiences/dancers’
hands reached for the sky, while in the London part of the act, three
dancers were lifted above the group and reached for the camera, potentially
calling viewers across Europe to join them. The heterogeneous
groups of people dancing could provoke an emotional reaction, as these
embodied communities in the material space that was the Oslo arena
and the imaginary (TV) space of Europe gave an image of ‘a lived connection’,
particularly among younger generations in Europe, thus indicating
one of the many, existing European communities. The utopian
performatives that emerged between audiences and various bodies performing
‘Glow’ were momentary, grasped only partially. In the same
46 Feeling European
way that ‘utopian performatives spring from a complex alchemy of
form and content, context and location, which take shape in moments
of utopia as doings, as process, as never ﬁnished gestures towards a
potentially better future’ (Dolan, 2005: 8), the dance and song kept on
moving across Europe, challenging any understanding of a European
community as transhistorical or essentialist.
However, ‘Glow’ did not manage to capture the complex image of
European communities in their plurality, as only one community that
crosses national borders emerged: the community of the Eurovision
fans who were recruited to perform. Furthermore, if ‘ﬂash mobs envision
themselves as a slap in the fact of convention’ (Muse, 2010: 20),
‘Glow’ did not cause – at least visibly – interruption or disruption
in the European public spaces or did not conclude with the dispersal
of the different groups, thus acknowledging the ﬂash mob’s ﬂeeting
nature.2
Although performers’ recruitment and planning happened
through viral communication, ‘Glow’ did not appear to react to the realities
of contemporary European urban life but instead exempliﬁed how
what ﬁrst appeared as an experimental form of public performance has
now largely become mainstream and commodiﬁed. All of the recorded
footage focused on the dancers, while no audiences in the actual location
of the dance appear and their reaction was not visible. In other
words, the carefully edited and rehearsed image of Europe ‘sharing the
moment’ did not include anyone who was not ofﬁcially prepared for the
act. This absence of audiences on the location of the ﬂash mob presents
‘Glow’ more as a spectacle than as a performance of long-lasting ‘cracks
[that] they [i.e. mobsters] hope to make in people’s sense of the stability
of everyday life’ (Muse, 2010: 14). These cracks can make a ﬂash mob
a subversive practice and their lack in the Eurovision example raises
questions about the politics of the act.
The synchronized dance produced a naïve understanding of a shared
identity and celebrated what can otherwise be perceived as a rather
dystopian uniformity that neglects what Gerard Delanty and Chris
Rumford (2005: 30) describe as a ‘plural conception of Europe’ through
a ‘constellation of civilisations’. The footage from various European
households, where families or groups of friends in almost identical living
rooms watched the contest, can be read as a representation of a
pan-European social class that comprises ESC audiences. The celebratory
image of Europe dancing was incomplete: the ﬂash mob articulated
a rather totalizing and heteronormative representation of contemporary
Europe without clearly contesting it or at least allowing space for
difference.
Marilena Zaroulia 47
In short, ‘Glow’ indicated the limits of utopian performatives on the
Eurovision stage and raised questions about the ways in which European
identities might exist together in the same geographical and imagined
space that is Europe, as well as the potentiality of a European public
sphere, a space of participation for European citizens. Peter Rehberg
has proposed that understanding the paradox of nationality on the
Eurovision stage involves an engagement with camp strategies as ‘the
inevitable articulation of one’s endeavor to represent nationality’ (2007:
65). Considering how the act could emotionally affect an audience as
well as its limitations or failures, ‘Glow’ is another example of the complex
ideologies and dramaturgies that underpin the ESC. It presents
a queer strategy of staging Europe by responding to the calls for a
European public sphere or civil society question. On the one hand, the
ﬂash mob aimed to produce a utopian version of a Europe that is ‘notyet-set’
and perhaps will never be, but instead illustrated a rather ﬁxed
representation of European identities and communities through the
chosen choreography. On the other hand, the impression that ‘Glow’
through its ﬂeeting dramaturgy of feeling left on certain viewing publics
might ‘serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our
mental and ideological imprisonment’ (Jameson, 2005: xiii) and thus
invite us to consider other possibilities of European communities. For
Fredric Jameson, ‘the best utopias are the ones that fail the most comprehensively’
(2005: xiii) and perhaps the utopian quality of the ESC lies
precisely in its failing attempts to represent European identities or public
spheres, in its ‘celebration of Europe only negatively’ (Rehberg, 2007:
65), thus reminding us that Europe is this impossible task that is yet to
arrive but must be pursued, beyond EU politics.
Düsseldorf, 2011: ‘Head Up High’
In 1990 my identiﬁcations as Greek and European were interconnected
because of narratives and images – including ‘Insieme’ – that established
Greece as a proud member of the vision of European unity; in 2010, the
Oslo ESC provoked consideration of the possibility of being a ‘citizen of
the world’ alongside European identiﬁcation. In May 2011, when I travelled
to Düsseldorf alongside other members of the Eurovision and the
‘New’ Europe Research Network to attend the contest for the ﬁrst time
live, new questions about my Greek/European/cosmopolitan subjectivity
were raised. Against a backdrop of failures across the Eurozone that
reﬂected on, or as failures of, Greece, I had to reassess how I identiﬁed
with Greek and European collectivities, which no longer seemed to
48 Feeling European
complement each other but instead were in clear opposition.3
On the
day of the second semi-ﬁnal, news of violent clashes that had erupted
following a general strike in my home town reached me. The contrast
between images of struggle in Athens and the celebratory atmosphere
of a Europe united through music in the ESC host city was striking.
Inevitably, I remembered ‘Insieme’ and the excitement of what now
appeared as a void promise of European unity. I reassessed ‘Glow’ as
a naïve articulation of EU hegemony where citizens have access to a
controlled public sphere of uniformity, and where illusionary participation
in a system governed by the logic of global capitalism is cloaked as
liberal democracy.
My experience of the 2011 ESC and particularly my emotional reactions
manifested a fundamental shift in my identiﬁcation as a European
subject, whereby my ‘I’ was attached to a European ‘we’ which was different
from the ideal vision of Cutugno’s song, the ﬂash mob’s rippling
effect and the celebratory communities gathering outside the Düsseldorf
arena. Although this was the ﬁrst time I could experience the contest
live, I did not feel that I was ‘sharing a moment’ alongside the rest of
Europe or, rather, I questioned what the Europe was I now belonged to.
A possible reading of the strong alienation that I experienced while
in Germany would suggest that my Greekness limited any possibility
for a European identiﬁcation, particularly when considering that since
2010, Greece had offered a spectacle of threat and punishment across
Europe. According to such a reading, feelings of anger and shame, and
Eurosceptic positions, would limit any possibility of engaging with the
contest as a performance of Europeanness. That year was signiﬁcantly
different from the European elections two decades earlier, when Greeks
could proudly and ‘with their heads held high’ – to use the popular
expression to which Verney also alludes – be in Europe; like the countries
of the Eastern bloc at the turn of the 1990s, Greece is ‘othered’ in
contemporary Europe.
Despite the call for pride in the song’s lyrics by means of the same
expression, ‘τo κεϕ ´αλι ψηλ´α και τα χ ´ερια ανoιχτ ´α’ (‘head held up high
and arms open’), I experienced strong alienation towards the Greek
act (Figure 1.2). ‘Watch my Dance’ was a hybrid of hip-hop dance
and traditional zeibekiko music, ostensibly attempting to respond to the
challenges of post-bailouts Greece. The song narrated a story of betrayal
and survival, culminating in a heroic dance performed against a background
of ancient ruins; blending allusions to antiquity, reference via
zeibekiko dance to centuries of Ottoman rule and contemporary rapping,
‘Watch my Dance’ aptly illustrated contemporary Greek identity as an
Marilena Zaroulia 49
Figure 1.2 Loukas Yiorkas and backup dancers perform ‘Watch My Dance’,
Greece’s 2011 ESC entry
Source: Alain Douit.
amalgam of often contradictory cultural references, which indicate the
Western/Eastern inﬂuences on the country. The act provoked passionate
dancing among Greeks in the arena, thus capitalizing on nationalist
sentiments which had surfaced in discourses since May 2010 and were
reminiscent of attitudes that deﬁned Greek foreign policy and populist
antagonism in the 1980s.
Although the song could be read as my generation’s allegoric response
to the crises, since both performers (Loukas Yiorkas and Stereo Mike)
grew up in the same period as me, I felt anger, shame, and frustration,
unable to identify with this representation of Greekness and thus relate
to other Greeks around me in the arena. ‘Watch my Dance’ perpetuated
the myth of a nation of proud survivors that ‘hold heads high’, thus
transferring the ﬁnancial and institutional opposition between EU and
Greece to the ESC stage, while satisfying an imaginary of national superiority,
as it was performed in a German city. In fact, the 2011 Greek
entry demonstrated the modernized and Europeanized face of contemporary,
Greek popular music – a product of the processes of globalization
and late capitalism, elements that led to the crisis that the song’s content
aspired to critique. In other terms, the Greek song could be read as resisting
and responding to the crises, but its spectacular staging and eclectic
50 Feeling European
borrowings from musical and other cultural inﬂuences undermined its
efﬁcacy at a political level but strengthened it at an affective one, in
either positive or negative terms.4
Even in these negative terms, the contest’s affective dimensions
present an effective way to map moments of national and European
identiﬁcations, particularly in critical moments of European history.
If affect shapes individual and collective bodies, the shared or solitary
experience of affect while watching the ESC can shape an experience
of Europe as a protean term that exists in the present but gestures to a
future. According to Muñoz, utopia is a temporal and spatial stage which
moves us beyond the present and expresses ‘a politics of emotion’ (2009:
97). Examples like the 1990 Italian song, the 2010 Norwegian interval
act, and the 2011 Greek representation of Greek-European tension are
utopian in the ways that they generated intense feelings while producing
views on what is possible or not in Europe, what kinds of communities
are visible or not, and how particular forms of identiﬁcation emerge
and are consolidated. These utopian performatives – affective responses
that negotiate a sense of what is yet to come – indicate the failure that
is inherent in any utopian project, and in negative terms expose what
is a disappointing and limiting present; they may not show us what the
way to Europe is but they indicate which one is not.
In 2003, in the wake of massive public protests against the Iraq War,
Jürgen Habermas and Derrida identiﬁed the possibility of a European
public sphere, suggesting that ‘the power of emotion has brought
European citizens jointly to their feet’ (2003: 292). Ten years later, in
the 2012 context of failure of the ofﬁcial mode of European governance,
what emerges is ‘a European populism, a simultaneous movement or a
peaceful insurrection of popular masses who will be voicing their anger
as victims of the crisis’ (Balibar, 2010). This power of emotion might
pave the way for a European public sphere, both as a utopian project
and as a necessity. In a context where neoliberal rationality is advocated
as the only way out of the crisis, a return to emotion as what binds
people together can indicate a politics of resistance, beyond national
identiﬁcation, and shape a European civil society where the political is
driven by ‘passion ... fantasies, desire, and those things that a rationalist
approach is unable to understand in the very construction of human
subjectivity and identity’ (Mouffe, 2001: 40–41).
Janelle Reinelt has offered a critique of Habermas’ theory as excluding
particular subjects and questioned the role of the public sphere as a
space of consensus in a global age. Her proposition is that such forms of
expression as affect and emotion should be included in the formation
of a public sphere:
Marilena Zaroulia 51
the governing geometry of this sphere needs to be envisioned not as
a uniﬁed ﬁeld but rather as a network or a rhizome with a plurality of
entry points and, indeed, of publics. There is no monolithic sphere.
(Reinelt, 2011: 18)
Reinelt’s views are signiﬁcant for an understanding of the European
public sphere, and of the role of the ESC – both in production and
reception – in that rhizome of consensus and dissent. In a growing
context of anger at the EU’s politics as well as hope for rising public
movements of resistance, an understanding of affect and emotion as
crucial components of ideology and belonging can shed light both into
how European politics and identities happen outside Eurovision and
into how a new version of the European public sphere might emerge.
The relation between the ESC and European audiences can generate
utopian performatives that in their affective potency propose, either
positively or negatively, ways of moving beyond the present. Derrida
suggests that one can ‘feel European among other things’ (1992: 83).
Hence the feeling European sensibility might be an intense, affectbased
reaction, the last identiﬁcation (Passerini, 2007) that emerges only
momentarily and is bound to disappear; it is a utopian performative
per se, which leaves a trace on the history of European identities at large
and on the micronarratives of a subject’s European identiﬁcation in speciﬁc
contexts. In 1999, Étienne Balibar emphasized that it is necessary
that ‘the project of democratisation and economic construction common
to the East and West, the North and South ... will be elaborated
and will gain support of its peoples – a project that depends ﬁrst on
them’ (2004: 10). In what appears to be a crucial historical juncture
which could be ‘the end of the EU’ (Balibar, 2010), Europeans face the
challenge to experience feeling as it is emerging in the actually existing,
multiple, and often contradictory European public spheres. This feeling
can allow democratic participation across countries, shape new modes
of European identiﬁcation beyond a deﬁned notion of Europe and
thus, returning to Balibar, render ‘Europe impossible: Europe possible’
(2004: 10).
Notes
1. In 1989–1990 the ﬁrst major scandal in post-dictatorship Greece was revealed:
a network of corruption that involved the banking system, press, and leading
ﬁgures of the governing socialist party, including the prime minister, was
exposed. This caused nine months of political instability and three consecutive
national elections. The argument about the imperative of the country’s
modernization and Europeanization that would guarantee the ‘cleansing’ of
52 Feeling European
the political system from clientelism and corruption gained momentum during
the pre-election period and paved the way for discourses, which claimed
that Greece’s political future and ﬁnancial growth could only be guaranteed if
European standards were, or at least appeared to be, met.
2. In the spring of 2010 and prior to the night of the live ﬁnal, recordings of
the ﬂash mob dance had taken place in various countries across the continent:
Spain, Iceland, Slovenia, Sweden, Lithuania, the UK, Germany, and
Ireland. The call for participation was advertised through the ofﬁcial website
of the ESC, as well as through fans’ websites, pages on Facebook and other
social media. People who were interested in participating in the ﬂash mob
could learn the choreography, using online videos that explained the score
in four parts. Although it is possible that a small number of people who had
not gone through the process of rehearsal might have joined on the day of
recording, the majority of participants were Eurovision fans or at least friends
of Eurovision fans who had actively chosen to prepare for and participate in
the ﬂash mob. In the case of London, a short advert in the Evening Standard
(5 May 2010) clearly states that participants ‘need to learn the dance before
turning up’ for the recording.
3. It is impossible and beyond the chapter’s scope to engage in detail with the
Greek crisis of public debt and its implications for the country and the EU.
Since April 2010, Greece has gone through its worst period of recession since
1945, as in order to secure bailout packages from the IMF and the European
Central Bank, governments have implemented severe austerity measures, leading
to a rise in unemployment and poverty rates as well as extreme ideological
positions and practices, primarily from the Far Right party. In Balibar’s terms,
‘Europe ... imposed on it [i.e. Greece] the coercive rules of the IMF, which protect
not the nations, but the banks, and promise deep and endless recession’
(2010). Greece, alongside other countries of the European periphery (Portugal,
Italy, Ireland, and Spain), seemed to be in a state of emergency, while the possibility
of the country’s default on its debt was often used – particularly by
German government ofﬁcials – to induce panic among Greek citizens.
4. Providing a reading of the act’s relative ESC success – it ﬁnished seventh – is
complex, for it might have been largely due to diasporic Greeks voting for an
act that ﬂattered the nation’s ego; on the other hand, it could also have been
due to the song’s musical references and the growing appeal of hip hop music
among the younger generation across Europe.