Until Baby Lasagna’s folk-techno breakthrough ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ leapt to the top of this year’s Eurovision odds, Croatia had never been among the Eurovision favourites since Doris Dragović’s ‘Marija Magdalena’ in 1999 – when Baby Lasagna was only two years old, Ukraine had not even begun to compete, and some members of Måneskin had not even been born.
Back in 1999, Croatia recording a first Eurovision win as an independent country would have seemed only a matter of time. Most of Yugoslavia’s nostalgically remembered light pop entries from the 1980s, including Dragović’s first Eurovision appearance in 1986 and Yugoslavia’s only winning song in 1989, had come from the Zagreb studio of Yugoslavia’s federal public broadcaster.
Zagreb hosted Eurovision 1990, with Tajči’s legendary home entry ‘Hajde da ludujemo’, days before the pro-independence Croatian Democratic Union would win multiparty elections, and weeks before RTV Zagreb would transform into Croatian Radio-Television (HRT), with the mission of promoting a Westernised, central European identity for the nation and separating from Yugoslav culture for good.
After making its independent Eurovision debut in 1993, Croatia took six top ten places in seven years between 1995 and 2001 – and then never again.
Where did it all go wrong?
As late as 2005–6 when established stars Boris Novković and Severina tried to mine the vein of Eurovision’s passion for ethnopop, Croatia could still expect to place just below the top ten (Novković came 11th, Severina 12th). Croatia’s next entry failed to qualify from the semi-final, the two next entries came 21st and 18th, and between 2010 and 2022 a dismal qualification record saw only two Croatian entries, in 2016–17, reach the grand final at all.
The broadcaster which had been so keen to join Eurovision in 1992 that it organised sovereign Croatia’s first national preselection before its European Broadcasting Union membership was even complete even skipped the contest altogether in 2014–15, after its attempt to celebrate the addition of traditional Dalmatian klapa singing to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list with a hastily-assembled klapa supergroup and tourist-trap video, ‘Mižerja’, fell flat in 2013.
Public finance problems, corruption, HRT management priorities, and the relatively lower stakes of being able to influence international perceptions of the nation through Eurovision once Croatia had EU membership in hand are all part of the story of Croatia’s Eurovision decline.
The tameness and Westernness of most of the songs even selected internally or chosen for HRT’s national final, Dora, since 2007 also suggests, however, an institutional fear of unleashing the kind of scandal Severina’s ‘Moja štikla’ caused in 2006 when her cheeky repackaging of folklore from the Dinaric highlands represented Croatia by combining her risqué humour with the most ‘Balkan’ of the folk traditions on the nation’s diverse cultural map.
HRT’s choice to allow Let 3 – who have played with that same folklore – to spin off a concept from their antimilitarist rock opera project into a Dora entry in 2023, then to give the veteran art-punk band the licence to transfer its satire of warmongering dictators to Eurovision with minimal changes, showed that creative risk was back on the menu, and earned Croatia its first grand final place since 2017.
Even then, producers did not originally choose ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ for Dora: the song that won such a landslide public vote from Croatian viewers that it scored more points than the other 15 finalists combined only moved up from HRT’s reserve list when another participant pulled out. Besides the anxious everyman of his performance or his back story as a metal guitarist going solo, Baby Lasagna’s persona is now also that of an underdog hero triumphing over corruption at the national broadcaster – what might in other circumstances be the plot of a post-Yugoslav Croatian film.
‘Rim tim tagi dim’ becoming so strong a favourite for Eurovision that Zagreb is among the European cities reserving their arenas for next May is ‘Moja štikla’’s revenge: proof that creative play with folklore, scaled up to the spectacle level that contemporary Eurovision demands, can put Croatian entries back into contention, and that the lode has been sitting there untapped all this while.
In the shadows
Marko Purišić, who took the name Baby Lasagna after leaving the folk metal band Manntra to start a solo career, comes from Umag on the tip of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula, almost the northernmost town before the Slovenian border and the still mildly contested Gulf of Piran.
Istria and the adjacent Gulf of Kvarner, where Let 3’s home town Rijeka is the largest city, both take pride in a cosmopolitan, multilingual identity which has often put the region at odds with homogenising patriotism at national level – and have now produced the two most talked-about Croatian Eurovision entries in years.
Manntra formed in Umag as teenagers, joining a list of musicians from the town which also includes Eurodance band Karma and the singer-songwriter Alka Vuica, whose kitsch image made her unusually able to explore Croatia’s Balkan hang-ups – and hint at sapphic relationships – in the mid-1990s’ and early 2000s’ Croatian pop scene. (The city council booked Vuica and Karma to make a summer dance video showing off Umag’s beach tourism in 2015.)
Except when the privately-owned Stella Maris resort plays host to the Sea Star electronic music festival or the Croatia Open tennis championships, Umag is somewhat off the map of Croatia’s headline tourist destinations. The hill towns and villages of inland Istria are even more so, though a regional ecotourism strategy aims to change that.
The 3.4 million views already gathered for the official video of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, filmed in the Umag countryside, are a promotional opportunity for Umag’s own brand that city leaders couldn’t fail to engage with: the city council and tourist board are even contributing to the logistical costs of Baby Lasagna’s performance in Malmö ‘so that Umag and Croatia will be represented in the “world” as they deserve.’
With just two online song releases before ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ to his name since leaving Manntra, Baby Lasagna’s Dora performance was his first as a lead vocalist, and the vulnerability he showed on Instagram and TikTok videos opening up about his confidence struggles immediately endeared him to a fan culture that commonly adores performances of ‘soft masculinity’ in its male idols.
Though only 28, Purišić has had the benefit of a decade’s experience in live music through Manntra, who began finding their way on to the German folk metal scene in 2017 by collaborating with the frontman of medieval metal band In Extremo, and saw their latest album without Purišić enter the German charts in 2023 – a level of exposure beyond the post-Yugoslav region of which many Croatian acts who are better-known at home only dream.
Manntra brought German folk metal style back to Dora in 2019 with their fourth-placed ‘In The Shadows’ (not the last Finnish coincidence in this post), where Purišić is just about visible in a grey tunic on the right:
Baby Lasagna’s folk metal and industrial background carries through into the lighter-hearted vibe of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, with strong influences of Rammstein, just like 2023’s Finnish Eurovision sensation Käärijä. ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ was always going to be compared to Käärijä’s ‘Cha cha cha’ because of its own driving riffs and its ability to explore both personal vulnerability and an actual social problem beneath hedonistic top-notes, even before Baby Lasagna’s Dora outfit turned out to also feature puffy sleeves – as able to inspire fan art as Käärijä’s green bolero in 2023, but in this case alluding to Istrian folk costume.
Those Rammstein-like riffs, similarly, also have roots in a wellspring of experimentation with local folk tradition by Istrian pop and rock musicians which dates back to the mid-1990s and even had a token presence at Dora but never came close to representing Croatia at Eurovision itself.
Ča, ča, ča, ča-ča-ča-ča
In the fraught cultural politics of mid-1990s Croatia, alternative-minded Istrian pop and rock musicians started affirming their regional identity by singing in their own dialect, creating a movement known as the ‘ča-val’ or ‘ča-wave’ (‘ča’ is the Istrian word for ‘what’, lending its name to the ‘čakavian’ dialect; standard literary Croatian, ‘štokavian’, says ‘što’).
Ča-val bands like Gustafi, from Pula, developed a laid-back musical idiom which expressed what they saw as the region’s mentality and claimed a full place for their own dialect in Croatian rock.
Ča-val overlapped with the ‘etno’ movement, where musicians across Croatia in the mid-1990s started exploring lower-profile regional folk traditions in more serious, authentic ways than mainstream showbusiness or TV folklore shows had been accommodating. The sound eventually crossed over into mainstream pop, with trained ethnomusicologist Lidija Bajuk and TV presenter Ivana Plechinger both presenting songs inspired by music from the northern region of Međimurje in Dora 1997.
Istria’s offerings to the etno movement were its traditional bagpipes (the ‘mih’) and oboe-like ‘sopile’ and ‘roženice’, played to the region’s distinctive six-tone musical scale.
In 1999, songwriter Livio Morosin and revivalist bagpiper Dario Marušić teamed up to record their defining Istrian etno album Bura, tramuntana, named for two winds that buffet the Istrian coast. Their combination of bagpipes, drumming, and electronic beats on one of its most experimental tracks created an effect not too far from ‘Rim tim tagi dim’:
Ča-val even trickled into Dora around 2000–1 in entries by its most chart-friendly representative, Alen Vitasović, and the etno musician / Radio Pula music editor Bruno Krajcar. Showcasing Istrian bagpipes, dialect and scale to variousextents, these typically appealed to voters in Istria and Kvarner but failed to resonate across the rest of the nation in the way that Let 3 and Baby Lasagna’s creative engagements with the region’s folklore would go on to do.
Like Let 3’s anti-war message, Baby Lasagna has also managed to speak to a serious social theme – the unprecedented scale of youth emigration which has become an ‘existential’ debate in Croatian society.
I’m going away and I sold my cow
Since the late 19th-century, hundreds of thousands of young men like the protagonist of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, and smaller numbers of young women, have left impoverished Croatian towns and villages in search of a new life abroad. In the days before mass air travel evoked by Baby Lasagna’s sepia-toned lyrics video, these rite-of-passage journeys often meant decades-long or lifelong separation from the families, communities, crafts and traditions that emigrants were leaving behind.
The farmhouse setting of Baby Lasagna’s official video, filmed near Umag with local residents playing his friends and neighbours, wrapped a cinematic visual identity around the song and established a signature look for his Eurovision persona when it appeared online two days before Dora.
Finishing his last farm chores before a leaving party that becomes increasingly anarchic as night falls, fires are lit and home-made brandy flows, he shares his anxious emotions and his sense of humour with the viewer, rocks out in the barn with a band of metalheads in balaclavas inspired by traditional Istrian lacework (also on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list), and syncs the instantly memeable line ‘Meow, cat, please meow back’ with a second’s clip of him holding a one-eyed ginger cat, knowing exactly what the cat-based attention economy of digital culture will make of that.
The cat is his own cat, the internet will joyously find out. He has three cats. Their videos go on TikTok. The cats now have a children’s picture book.
The visuals on stage when the pyro finale kicks in are neon dancing cats. Of course they are. In Malmö there are supposed to be even more.
According to Croatia’s national statistics bureau, almost 350,000 Croatian citizens left the country between 2013 – the year Croatia joined the EU – and 2022, with sociologists finding that nearly three quarters of all young emigrants in their research were motivated by better salaries, employment prospects, and living standards abroad. Youth emigration on such a scale is widely debated in Croatian society as a crisis that has left villages in the poorest areas depopulated and primary schools closed down because they simply had no children to teach.
‘Rim tim tagi dim’ communicates the contradictory emotions of leaving for a better life abroad, voiced by a singer who could have followed that path himself – like his younger brother, now the drummer in German gothic rock band Mono Inc. – but chose the quiet of small-town life with his fiancée and his cats in a village of 300 people, Kaštelir.
Desiring to grow into maturity and modernity, his character simultaneously understands he is leaving behind the community that gives him his identity, so throws himself into celebrating with them one last time.
The emo angst of his chorus is familiar musical language for anyone who grew up in the same alternative subcultures, but meshes even more creatively with the lived angst of leaving your home to fulfil your dreams, quite possibly for good, because that home has failed to provide what you would have needed to fulfil them there. Under Baby Lasagna’s ‘round of decompress’ sits this collective, as well as personal, tragedy.
Such a predicament will be relatable across all Europe’s peripheries, but hit hardest in the Balkans, worst affected by the European financial crisis since 2007–8 and least well served by what they were promised on joining the EU. Beneath the fiction of Europe ‘uniting through music’ at Eurovision are structural inequalities between West and East which have left many south-east European broadcasters only able to intermittently take part.
Before Romania’s financial relationship with the EBU deteriorated so badly that its 2016 entry was disqualified from the contest at short notice and the broadcaster will not even broadcast Eurovision 2024, its 2015 entrants Voltaj dedicated their song ‘De la capăt’ – with one of Eurovision’s most poignant language switches – to the children left behind by Romanian parents who have seen no alternative to emigrating for work abroad if they want to be able to give their children a better life.
While Voltaj sang from the perspective of a migrant father, losing his own language as he reminds himself why he is away from his child, ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ is a young man’s eye-view of how migration and masculinity have resonated in this part of the world.
Maybe they also know our dance
Wrapped up in Baby Lasagna’s line about ‘those city boys’, ‘all so pretty and so advanced’ – which he has learned to deliver with an ever more camp wrist-flick as his confidence as a frontman has grown – are layers of meaning both inside and outside the song which point to post-Yugoslav masculinities in flux.
In the post-Yugoslav space’s conventional cultural politics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, which have underpinned so many musical controversies like Severina’s scandal in 2006, the city is where the nation grows up beyond its peasant traditions to become cosmopolitan and European, and leave the Balkans behind: of course ‘they’ won’t want to know ‘our’ dance.
Though leave it until late at night, and – as anthropologists are still discussing – those dances from the village, the more Balkan the better, are where those city boys really go to cast off their modern European inhibitions, let their emotions out, and have their round of decompress. (Istria’s as far from the Balkans as you can get in Croatia, but in this context the village setting will still do.)
Eurovision’s cultural economy since the ethnopop winners of the 2000s further turns the conventional urban/rural cultural politics on its head. When the contest’s very concept as a popular music competition between nations rewards ideas which are simultaneously this contemporary in aesthetic and neotraditional in inspiration, those city boys will want to know our dance, so they can go off and win Eurovision with it.
Unlike the played-utterly-straight sentimentality of ‘Mižerja’, ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ remixes folklore into the kind of creative expression that has driven many of Eurovision’s most successful entries since Jamala and Salvador Sobral’s intimatewinning entries in 2016–17: where the personal authenticity of young masculine vulnerability and sensitivity, and a social anxiety with which neurodivergent fans have sensed something in common, meets the collective authenticity of a context that viewers in numerous countries may have lived themselves or witnessed in their migrant parents’ lives.
Since his Dora performance, Baby Lasagna’s journey from Eurovision has become inseparable from the digital fan culture he interacts with and his newfound national celebrity at home. The singer has been invited to advertise Kaufland supermarkets and Madre Badessa spirits (owned by the pop producer Tonči Huljić, composer of Doris’s ‘Marija Magdalena’ and three other Croatian Eurovision entries).
The broadcaster that did not judge ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ strong enough – or maybe judged it too strong – to initially select it for Dora has since coordinated flashmobs in Zagreb, Split, Zadar, Osijek and Umag with hundreds of schoolchildren, cheerleaders, police officers, firefighters, dance troupes and assorted local people performing the song’s dance.
The picture they paint of an often-so-divided nation uniting to celebrate Croatian achievement which, by leading the Eurovision odds, is already world-class is similar to the atmosphere that breaks out when the national football team heads towards the finals of the men’s World Cup, as it has a remarkable tendency to do.
Outspoken footballer Dejan Lovren might have denounced ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ as ‘demonic’ on the night it won Dora, but the Croatian football federation has jumped on the Baby Lasagna bandwagon by sending him a customised team shirt to bring him luck in Malmo. Even Croatia’s former HDZ president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović – no stranger to a patriotic bandwagon when Croatians do well at international competitions – has voiced her excitement for his song in terms that attempt to fit it into her own interpretation of national unity.
Fantastic to see a kind, modest, and grounded artist like Marko, who proudly celebrates his heritage and speaks of issues that resonate universally—offensive to none. Let’s rally behind him! Go Marko! Go 🇭🇷! #Eurovision2024#GoCroatia#BabyLasagna#RimTimTagiDim#VolimHrvatsku
— Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (@KolindaGK) May 3, 2024
Baby Lasagna travels to Malmö amid more excitement for a Croatian Eurovision entry than he will have been able to remember during his own lifetime, and the strongest chance of winning that Croatia has ever had as an independent country – in fact, probably higher chances than the only Croatian/Yugoslav winners, Riva, had in 1989.
Disunited by music
And yet, this is not a normal Eurovision. The apparent double standard of the EBU expelling Russian broadcasters from the contest in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but continuing to allow Israel’s broadcaster to participate despite the devastation Israeli forces have caused to Palestinian life and culture in Gaza since Hamas’s terror attack of 7 October 2023, has seen Eurovision added to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) list of targets for the first time in a year when the contest has been held outside Israel. (The EBU contends that the Russian and Israeli cases are not to be compared.)
Israeli forces’ new attack on Rafah started on the night of 6 May – last night, as I upload this post– with the Met Gala taking place in New York and with Eurovision week about to begin.
Contestants from ten countries (Baby Lasagna not among them) posted a joint statement in April about their discomfort at taking part in Eurovision in these circumstances, though PACBI still described their statement as a ‘patronising and colonial attitude’ that did not excuse them from ‘complicity in [the] artwashing’ of a ‘live-streamed genocide’.
Activists’ longstanding critique of how Israeli public diplomacy promotes the country as an LGBTQ+-friendly state to appeal to international LGBTQ+ public opinion, or what they call ‘pinkwashing’, means there has been particular pressure on queer artists with links to alternative scenes that advocate for solidarity with Palestine, like the UK’s Olly Alexander and Ireland’s Bambie Thug (who both signed the April statement), to withdraw from a contest in which, in the final reckoning, they may have been contractually compelled to take part. Every contestant in Malmö is entering a very different atmosphere than would have been expected after the highs of Liverpool in 2023 – an event that inspired the EBU to take up the BBC’s slogan ‘United By Music’ as a permanent one for the competition.
On the day of Eurovision’s heads of delegation meeting in Malmö to review and confirm each broadcaster’s performance plans, a public artwork outside Malmö Live event centre bearing that same slogan was defaced with fake blood by local protestors who oppose Eurovision being held in Malmö while Israel’s broadcaster is taking part.
Almost one in five musicians and cultural organisations who were due to be part of the city of Malmö’s cultural programming have pulled out in protest, including Malmö Dance Academy – who stated on Instagram that this was ‘because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank’ – well-known acts from Sweden’s annual national final like Dotter and the 2024 runners-up Medina, and, reportedly, Malmö Pride, which is now no longer listed as a partner for a performance in the Eurovision fan village by Conchita Wurst that had been publicised only at the beginning of April.
Both security reasons and the drop in local buy-in seem to have made Malmö scale down its city-based activities, such as cancelling a public stage which should have hosted free performances in Malmö’s designated ‘Eurovision Street’ (remaining performances have moved into the fan village, which is easier to secure), and scaling back the ‘turquoise carpet’ ceremony which produced such dramatic photos from Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery last year that large brands immediately started contacting Liverpool’s museums service to book the space for advertising shoots.
Eurovision will not take over Malmö as Liverpool was praised for enabling it to do in 2023. The step change in musical creativity it has witnessed in recent years may also be threatened if the more alternative artists like Käärijä or Alexander who have given the event new life become dissuaded from participating, especially should PACBI’s boycott campaign become a standing one.
As the only city likely to meet the EBU’s hosting requirements should Croatia win, Zagreb has reserved the city’s arena for May 2025, and will organise a free public screening of the Eurovision grand final, as would usually only happen for major international sports matches. Just like Malmö, however, Zagreb would not reap the full benefits of hosting Eurovision if a repeat boycott hit the contest, or even if the brand’s image starts to alienate more of its once-faithful visitors and fans.
During the Obama presidency in the USA, the queer cultural theorist Lauren Berlant coined the phrase ‘cruel optimism’ to describe attachments to ideas of ‘the good life’ which cannot be fulfilled but, in our yearning for them, hold us back from what might be fulfilment otherwise.
Berlant’s theory has helped critical and feminist scholars make sense of the paradoxes of economic precarity in situations as diverse, and yet connected, as how young people navigate long-term unemployment in Turkey and why Nepalese Gurkhas wager their future happiness on training to work in militaries and private security companies that still subordinate them in paternalistic, pseudocolonial ways.
Migration as Baby Lasagna frames it is a cruel optimism: attachment to the good life that might be had abroad or in the big city, which might be materially more liveable if the cards fall right, pulls you away from the differently good life at home. But when the institution behind Eurovision as an event cannot, by its nature as an association of public service broadcasters responsible to their governments, deliver on all the hopes for justice that its fandom have projected on to it since at least Conchita Wurst’s apparently historic victory in 2014, feeling attached to Eurovision comes with a cruel optimism of its own.
This post originally appeared at ESC Insight on 9 May 2023.
Since ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ won Croatia’s Dora festival in March, Eurovision fans outside the post-Yugoslav region have been getting to know a band who were using their art to mock and shock repressive social forces even before Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991.
Much as Konstrakta brought Belgrade’s artistic avant-garde to Eurovision in 2022, Let 3 are representing the famously innovative, politically-engaged punk scene of their home town Rijeka, a city which prides itself on its progressive outlook (Croatia’s first lesbian NGO, LORI, was registered there in 2000), and has often been at odds with the national ruling party.
Its surrounding region has a proudly cosmopolitan regional identity, and even longer historical experience of fascist rule than the rest of former Yugoslavia underwent in 1941-5, because it was claimed by Italy after World War I and so lived under Mussolini’s fascist rule between 1922 and 1943. During the disarray of the post-WW1 peace settlement, Rijeka was even taken over in 1919-20 by the world’s first proto-fascist dictator, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is often credited with giving fascism its aesthetics.
In communist Yugoslavia, Rijeka’s student, music and art scene was among the most liberal and anti-authoritarian. Rijeka was one of five or six cities that drove the generation-defining Yugoslav ‘new wave’ of the early 1980s. Before co-founding Let 3, Damir Martinović Mrle (in the purple and rose-pink greatcoat, with the droopiest moustache) was the bassist in the Rijeka punk band Termiti. Their most famous song ‘Vjeran pas’ (‘Faithful dog’) satirised the submissiveness to authority needed to get ahead in the Yugoslav system, for an audience of youth in cities across former Yugoslavia promising themselves never to sell out that way.
After Termiti broke up, Mrle founded his own experimental band, then in 1986 joined his scene-mate Zoran Prodanović Prlja (the frontman who’ll inevitably be called ‘drag Stalin’) in a project they initially called Let 2 (Flight 2). In 1987 they took on more members and became Let 3.
Initially, Let 3 were satirising communist prudishness and conformity in the last years of Yugoslavia. Like other punk bands, especially in Croatia and Slovenia, they also confronted the militarism which had very real effects on their own lives as young men expected to do compulsory military service in the Yugoslav army (indeed, student resistance to conscription was a key part of the Slovenian independence movement which was blooming at the same time).
Images of their early performances show themes which are Let 3 trademarks to this day: huge moustaches, military headwear, and frequent male nudity, all exaggerating symbols of traditional masculinity to the point of ridicule. Sometimes they also employed confrontational drag that laughed in the face of the army’s ideas about what a healthy heterosexual man should be.
In 1990-1, the Yugoslav communist system finally fell apart, non-Serbs and democrats across Yugoslavia feared what would happen if Slobodan Milošević got his hands on federal power, a conservative nationalist party came to power in Croatia’s multi-party elections (which had their last round the very day after Eurovision 1990 in Zagreb), and Croatia and Slovenia both declared independence, only to be invaded by the Yugoslav army, which had taken Milošević’s side.
Ever since, Let 3’s stand has been against the patriarchal nationalism, ethnic chauvinism and religious conservatism that immediately dominated public discourse in Croatia and crowded out any alternative political visions for the independent nation.
By 1996, when they released their double concert album ‘Živi kurac‘ (Living d*ck, or more loosely F*ck all) and co-operated with theatre director Ivica Buljan on an avant-garde production of Jean Racine’s tragedy Phaedra, Let 3 had become an unmissable live act on the Croatian alternative scene.
They introduced themselves to the wider public through stunts such as releasing a completely blank album (which still sold 350 copies), creating another album in a single copy which they refused to release, staging a mock suicide by firing squad on Zagreb’s main square to protest their record company releasing it anyway, and displaying a four-metre-tall monument of a peasant grandmother with an enormous phallus in four Croatian cities and Ljubljana (using the incongruity to suggest that patriarchal masculinity had infected tradition so far that it had even taken over the most absurd figure it could).
To record the female vocals on their song ‘Profesor Jakov’, about an academic abusing his position to have an affair with a young female student, they teamed up with ENI, the girlband who represented Croatia in Eurovision 1997 and are also from Rijeka. Let 3 and ENI reunited in 2003 when, on a new album showing off their maturing sound, ENI recorded their own version, ‘Mara Pogibejčić’, from the perspective of the student in the song.
Let 3 provoked nationalist politics even further in 2005 when they released their electro-trash album ‘Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačka’ (The Bombing of Serbia and Čačak). Its title at very first glance could be interpreted as an ultranationalist threat towards Serbia and its provincial city of Čačak, if only by someone who knew nothing about Let 3. On the cover, the band posed in traditional men’s folk costumes from across former Yugoslavia, performing the kind of staged kolo dance that used to symbolise Yugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’, in front of an image of Dubrovnik’s harbour (which the Yugoslav military did bomb during Croatia’s war of independence in 1991).
The idea that a populist ‘neofolk culture’ is to blame for nationalism, ignorance, sexism and warmongering in former Yugoslavia is long-lived in the region’s intellectual and alternative circles across the region. (The phenomenon was nicknamed ‘turbo-folk’ in 1989 by the musician Rambo Amadeus – who represented Montenegro at Eurovision in 2012, and was suspended as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador over allegations of sexual harassment in March 2023).
‘Bombardiranje Srbije i Čačak’ was a full-frontal, X-rated satire of neofolk patriotism across the region. It combined new compositions, mostly with obscene titles, with folk songs from the different ex-Yugoslav nations – including one track named after a Serbian patriotic tune, ‘Rado ide Srbin u vojnike’ (‘Gladly does the Serb enlist’). Few titles could have been more provocative in a country where memories of war crimes committed by Serb paramilitaries and the Yugoslav army were still fresh (and memories of war crimes committed by Croats were still being silenced).
However, ‘Rado ide Srbin u vojnike’ is no ordinary folk tune: its composer Josif or Josip Runjanin was a Croatian Serb serving in the nineteenth-century Habsburg army, and also composed the song that became Croatia’s national anthem, making him ‘one of the strongest connections between the Serb and Croat peoples’.
Listeners expecting to be outraged that a Croatian band was adapting the song’s lyrics, which took on menacing connotations in the twentieth century, would instead have heard a deconstructed, obscenity-laden performance of completely different language intimating that any man who lets himself be taken in to joining the army by patriotic folklore is a fool.
Croatia’s own patriotic folklore came in for the same treatment in Let 3’s adaptation of ‘Ero s onoga svijeta’ (‘Ero from that other world’ or ‘Ero the joker’), the finale of the 1935 folk opera of that name by the renowned Croatian composer Jakov Gotovac. The peasant culture of the Dinaric mountains celebrated in epic poetry, staged by Gotovac and revisited by all the musicians who have popularised its folklore is one of vigorous patriarchs and moustachioed outlaws, producing the toughest soldiers and men. A few years before Let 3’s album, Croatia’s most prominent hard-right folk-rock musician had used the kolo from the finale of ‘Ero’ as the centrepiece of his first stadium concert in Split, which left-wing critics had widely seen as a fascistic spectacle.
Let 3’s ‘Ero’ builds to the same electrified crescendo. Performed by a band of punks in drag and giant fake moustaches, however, it could not be confused with the tune’s nationalistic versions to anyone tuned into Croatian cultural signals – especially not with their women’s choir decked out in the fake moustaches too.
This phase of Let 3’s career also marked their first brush with Eurovision, as guests in the music video for Severina’s entry in 2006. At least until 2023, ‘Moja štikla’ (‘My stiletto heel’) held the crown as Croatia’s most controversial Eurovision entry, for reasons that were not necessarily as visible outside former Yugoslavia. For generations, nothing has weighed more heavily in mainstream Croatian cultural politics than insecurity over needing to be recognised as ‘European’ rather than ‘Balkan’ – even at times like the height of Eurovision’s 2000s ethnopop boom, when ‘Balkan’ might be exactly what ‘Europeans’ want to see.
‘Moja štikla’ took its inspiration from Dalmatian and Dinaric folk traditions and Severina’s sense of humour, satirising Dinaric machismo from a woman’s perspective. Its arranger, Goran Bregović, had won a reputation for repackaging Balkan and Romani folklore, but was controversial because when war came to Bosnia he had left Sarajevo for Belgrade, so also had Serbian associations in Croatia. By the time of Dora 2006, the song’s team (including its composer Boris Novković, who represented Croatia in 2005) had already had to defend themselves against days of allegations that the song contained Serbian folklore, was in Serbian, was ‘turbo-‘folk’, or actually had lyrics by a famous Serbian songwriter instead of Severina – all of which would have made it utterly unsuitable to represent Croatia in patriotic media opinion.
In fact, folk traditions from the Dinaric region are precisely the elements of Croatian heritage that show its national culture is inseparable from the Balkans after all – so in her own way, Severina was also undercutting ethnocentric nationalism.
Severina’s Eurovision performance was accompanied by trained folk dancers from Dinaric towns which had been on the front line during the war, and the expert gajde (bagpipe) player Stjepan Večković from the national folk ensemble Lado, whose authenticity as representatives of Croatian national tradition couldn’t be questioned. (It’s likely among the performances that inspired the advice of ‘Love Love Peace Peace’ to ‘show the viewers your country’s ethnic background by using an old traditional folklore instrument that no one heard of before’.)
For the music video, Severina and her record label took a different tack and gave her sense of humour more free rein. A fifty-foot-fall Severina steps in high heels over prestigious Zagreb landmarks, accompanied by none other than her labelmates Let 3.
Let 3 still didn’t travel to Athens themselves, which might have been to a risk-adverse broadcaster’s relief. As their English-language Wikipedia entry observes, they were fined for performing naked at an outdoor gig in Varaždin later in 2006, and ‘the band’s defence that they had not been naked because they had corks in their anuses did not convince the judge’. In 2008 two of their members had a Sunday lunchtime talk show cut short by simulating corks being ejected from the same place.
Since then, Let 3 have released another live album (‘Živa pička’, complementing ‘Živi kurac’) and gone back to the studio for new projects in 2013 and 2016. ‘Kurcem do vjere’ / Thank You Lord, released as a conservative Catholic campaign group was gathering signatures to force a referendum on constitutionally banning equal marriage, featured Mrle and Prlja on the cover dressed as Catholic bishops holding comically large male organs instead of croziers, and included remakes of some of the band’s early songs plus music from some theatrical collaborations. ‘Angela Merkel sere’ (2016) was accompanied by a statue of the German Chancellor satisfying said bodily need, three years into Croatia’s membership of the EU.
In 2013 both Let 3 and Severina performed at a public concert to mobilise the ‘no’ vote in the 2013 referendum and protect the Croatian parliament’s freedom to introduce equal marriage. However, the referendum passed that December – after a turbulent year for international LGBTQ+ rights in which Eurovision 2013’s interval act celebrated equal marriage in Sweden, Krista Siegfrids had lent her voice at Eurovision to Finland’s own equal marriage campaign, and the Russian parliament had made sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ laws which might have made it illegal to broadcast both those same-gender kisses to under-18s.
Outside the band, Mrle has curated the underground arts venue Hartera for some years at Rijeka’s old paper mill, launched the Sailor Sweet and Salt Festival after Hartera closed, and formed an experimental side-project with his wife Ivana Mazurkijević (Mr.Lee and IvaneSky). He contributed to Rijeka’s pandemic-hit European Capital of Culture programme in 2020 – and didn’t have to look far for partners at the city council, because the head of culture at Rijeka city hall was Let 3’s former keyboardist Ivan Šarar.
‘MAMA ŠČ!’ actually stems from Mrle and Mazurkijević’s co-operation with the director Paolo Magelli, whose most recent project is an avant-garde reworking of the Greek comedy Lysistrata featuring lyrics by the journalist Predrag Lučić, who died in 2018 aged 53. In 1989, Lučić had co-founded the satirical magazine Feral Tribune, which through the 1990s and 2000s published allegations of public corruption and war-crimes cover-ups that no other Croatian publication would touch (and numerous jokes about genitalia and bodily functions, testing their freedom to transgress in Croatia’s new democracy). Routinely hauled through the courts by the Croatian authorities for defamation and other charges (including a 1993 photo-montage cover of Milošević and Croatia’s conservative president Franjo Tuđman naked in bed together), Feral closed down in 2008, but has a foundational place in the history of Croatian satire.
One of the Lučić songs used in LizistRATa, originally written for a Split production of Brecht’s anti-war satire Mother Courage and Her Children in 2013, was called ‘Kupi mi, mama, jedan mali rat’ (‘Mama, buy me one little war’), which inspired Mrle to start conceiving an alternative anti-war opera of his own – the project that became ‘MAMA ŠČ!’. The idea behind the ‘five horsemen of the apocalypse’ outfits in part of their video was already developing before Dora, and earlier versions show the fifth horseman’s blue windbreaker as the campaign jacket worn by volunteers for the ruling conservative party at election time.
By the time Let 3 appeared on Dora, in other words, Croatian viewers had a frame of reference going back more than thirty years for making sense of their uniforms, inflatable missiles and salutes (and for wondering what was going to be under those uniforms when they inevitably came off). While their lyrics describe militarism and machismo, the band’s profile as musicians and their subcultural positioning has already resolved what would otherwise be the ambiguity of where they stand.
If Let 3 as creators shared the misogyny of a song like ‘Riječke pičke’ (where Prlja’s character lists dozens of regions in former Yugoslavia, and declares Rijeka’s daughters are the best because they put out their pičke for him), you wouldn’t find a left-leaning eighties pop icon like Marina Perazić (the former vocalist of pop duo Denis and Denis, also from Rijeka, who has sung at Zagreb Pride) performing it at one of the band’s annual Antivalentinovo (Anti-Valentine’s) gigs – and they certainly wouldn’t have invited her to put those words into her mouth.
Their queer audience in Croatia and the rest of former Yugoslavia likewise trust Let 3 to be on their side against the forces that want to beat them for displaying much tamer forms of affection and gender nonconformity in public than Let 3 have ever put on stage.
Croatia hasn’t qualified for the grand final since 2017 even though in the 1990s it looked set to have a track record like Ukraine’s, and Albina missing out in 2021 felt like a genuine national blow to the dream of, as Roko Rumora puts it, having something to ‘show to Europe and have it recognized as equal, as worthy of inclusion on its own terms.’ If nothing else has worked – why not Let 3?
The Contest’s wider audience has had much less opportunity to witness Croatian cities’ radical performance tradition through their Eurovision ‘window’ than, say, the comparable scene in Estonia (where noise-punks Winny Puhh first took part in the national selection ten years ago). ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ mobilises very different reactions than ‘In corpore sano’, but Let 3 and Konstrakta draw from shared cultural reference points dating back to what the historian Ljubica Spaskovska called ‘the last Yugoslav generation’. (They captioned their photo with her at the Madrid pre-party ‘Konstractor’).
Let 3’s decades-long expertise in creating challenging art makes ‘ŠČ’ the hardest-working single letter in Eurovision history (if you write it in Ukrainian, Russian or Bulgarian Cyrillic – an alphabet which represents another taboo in Croatian public culture, because Serbian also uses Cyrillic, even though neither Serbian or Croatian has Щ/šč as a single letter themselves).
Roll it around a few times, and you might start to find their rhythmic enunciation of ŠČ! evokes military sounds: the roll of the snare drum, the collective stamp of well-drilled boots on the parade ground. This, they seem to suggest, is the sound of totalitarianism and that contemptible little crocodile of a psychopath (‘onaj mali psihopat! krokodilski psihopat!’) who can be sung about cathartically even if, while their political comment is subject to Eurovision rules, he can’t be named. The line expresses a lifetime of protest against such figures, but does risk being heard as stigmatising mental disability, or minimising the premeditated nature of military aggression, neither of which seem like what the band want to say.
Still, many named dictators are already in the sights of ‘MAMA ŠČ!’. The famous ‘tractor’ line could implicate both Putin and his ally Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, whose regime got itself banned from Eurovision a year before Putin’s Russia in 2021, and who gave Putin a tractor for his seventieth birthday last October. (When some Serbian media after Dora took the line as a slight against Serb refugees who fled the Croatian army’s last advance on tractors in August 1995, Mrle took the first opportunity to clarify the band had never meant to punch down.)
Prlja’s greatcoat, cap and moustache clearly suggest Stalin, and the bald-headed man holding the missiles – fellow Rijeka rocker Žanil Tataj-Žak, who Croatians may know best as an ex-vocalist for stadium rock band Divlje jagode – had ‘Njinle’ written on his forehead, backslang for ‘Lenin’, in Dora. Closer to home, the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito (who led the Yugoslav Partisan army to victory in 1945) customarily wore a white military uniform, and Croatia’s first president Tuđman was sometimes mocked for following his lead.
And So To Eurovision
In their close engagement with totalitarian aesthetics, Let 3 are perhaps as close as Eurovision will ever come to Laibach, the Slovenian band who have kept audiences guessing how much they mean when they play with themes and visuals from communist and fascist propaganda for more than forty years. (Laibach did record a song called ‘Eurovision’ in 2014.) Laibach-adjacent, too, are the colours and angles of their background visuals – which showcase drag performer Jovanka Broz Titutka from Zagreb’s radical drag scene (the figure dressed in green gym gear with garish make-up, who belongs to Zagreb’s House of Flamingo).
Like all ambiguous art which questions the allure of military power by placing its style and symbols up front, how well ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ can convey its messages depends on how far the audience realise how the band are inviting them to respond, and what they need to know about them to form that interpretation.
Past Eurovision performances too have faced this issue, sometimes when approaching military symbols through a queer lens. Hatari’s BDSM-inspired performers in 2019 made the views on authoritarianism and military occupation as clear as Eurovision rules would let them (and then more). The grey military uniforms worn by Saara Aalto’s female dancers in 2018 were not as pointedly political but still connected the performance to a long tradition of queer kitsch and military drag, in which a founding father is the artist Tom of Finland – an influence that one Croatian writer has already perceived in Let 3’s peaked leather caps. More obscurely and less immediately queer, the popera act Tosca Beat seemed heavily influenced by Laibach’s staging when competing to represent Slovenia in 2017.
Pro-LGBTQ+ stances and anti-militarism go together in Let 3’s military drag because, according to the politics the band have expressed for more than thirty years, patriarchy, homophobia and male insecurity are root causes of militarism, nationalism and war. The image of Prlja in pink peaked cap, Stalin moustache, lipstick and blusher will obviously get him compared to the graphic of ‘gay Putin’ or the ‘rainbow clown’, which Western campaigners popularised as an insult to the Russian leader when advocating a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 (part of the background to how Conchita Wurst was received in Copenhagen).
Let 3’s mockery of drag dictators, however, starts at home – where they have been standing up to militaristic, nationalistic, and aggressively heterosexual ideals of masculine leadership in their own context for so long that ‘home’ used to be a different state.
Since winning Dora, Let 3 have begun breaking the fourth wall to introduce international fans to their political context – though still coming back to the jokes about ass-cheeks and mutual sex. On the pre-Eurovision circuit, they have taught multilingual pre-party crowds how to chant ‘MAMA KUPILA TRAKTORA!’, and revived their version of ‘Ero’ – a perfectly-formed ethno-rock banger for fans of ‘Shum’ and ‘Trenuleţul’, but also a track born in resistance against home-grown nationalism and fascism. It will infuriate exactly whom Let 3 want to infuriate that probably the most-watched performance of ‘Ero s onoga svijeta’ outside Croatia this year comes from a band of lifelong antifascists and finishes with a punk in pink uniform waving the Progress Pride flag.
Their series of TikToks ‘teleporting’ themselves to Liverpool aboard their golden tractor (which is one way to avoid Brexit border delays) has showcased their friendship with Belgrade’s alternative scene, shouted out to Käärijä, and needled the CEO of Spotify over their share of the streaming fees for ‘MAMA ŠČ!’, but also condemned Putin’s dictatorial aggression against Mariupol, Kharkiv and Kyiv.
Arriving in Liverpool, Let 3 and their tractor have touched down in a country where the forces that want to criminalise drag internationally are gaining ground, drag queen story hours in public libraries are being threatened by the far right, the equalities minister has met approvingly with the governor of the US state passing the widest suite of anti-trans laws, and the UN’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has just been hearing from trans people across the country about how politicians and the media are whipping up fear against them during his own visit to the UK.
Exhibiting Let 3’s show to under-18s would already have been against the law in Russia and Hungary (which stopped broadcasting Eurovision after 2019), and, since the beginning of April, also in Tennessee.
Let 3’s art may not be for everyone, but the freedom to make it for anyone is the same freedom that lets Eurovision itself be a place of safety for LGBTQ+ fans – and one of the first freedoms that the dictators lampooned in ‘MAMA ŠČ!’ have struck against.
When Let 3 take the stage with their antimilitarist rock opera, they will be playing on the very edge of what it’s possible to say politically in a space like Eurovision – just like they have been doing all their careers.
Ukraine is the only country in Eurovision never to have failed to qualify from the semi-finals.
And in a happier year, that would be the first fact on fans’ minds when thinking about Kalush Orchestra’s chances in the competition.
Ten weeks ago, when Russian forces had just launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, far more urgent and horrific unknowns were pressing on Ukrainians and the watching world than whether their country would be in a position to send their entry to Eurovision in May. Under martial law, all men of military age, including the band members, were prohibited from leaving the country, while at least 5.7 million Ukrainians have fled abroad since the invasion began.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are already thought to have died in the invasion, with the full extent of brutalities committed by the occupying forces in places like Mariupol still to be revealed, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have reportedly been deported to remote locations in Russia. Yet Ukraine’s victories around Kyiv and elsewhere, the determination of the Ukrainian public, and the military aid rallied by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have all meant that, in a war where Putin has targeted Ukraine’s very existence as a nation, Ukraine still endures.
Indeed, it wasn’t until 2 April, the same day that Ukrainian forces finished retaking control of the entire Kyiv region, that Ukraine’s public broadcaster UA:PBC announced Kalush Orchestra would travel to perform live in Turin after all.
Since 2014, when Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea and tried to create de facto Russian entities out of separatist uprisings, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Ukraine’s reactions to the provocation have become one of the most contentious geopolitical themes confronting Eurovision almost every year.
But from Ukraine’s earliest days in Eurovision, the contest has represented a platform for cultural diplomacy and an opportunity to convey narratives of Ukrainian cultural identity to a West that has often been scarcely able to differentiate between Ukraine and Russia – while the style and scale of 21st-century Eurovision contests also owes something to Ukraine.
Dai-na dai-na, wanna be loved, dai-na, gonna take my wild chances
Ukraine’s debut entry in 2003, Oleksandr Ponomariov’s ‘Hasta la vista’, looks with hindsight almost like Australia’s out-of-competition performance in Eurovision 2014 – an ambitious delegation’s first opportunity to gauge the scale of the contest and start working out what it would take to make Eurovision their own.
Besides the graphics of an Apollo rocket marked with the Ukrainian flag and the presence of a spinning contortionist dressed in light blue, Ponomariov’s song was a relatively undemanding production with the mildly Latin flavour that Estonia and Latvia had both brought to their winning songs in 2001 and 2002.
Riga, the host city in 2003, was the second in a string of capital cities on the eastern, northern and southern peripheries of Europe that would host the contest throughout the 2000s, as the prize for their countries winning Eurovision the previous year. Estonia’s surprise win in 2001 had become the perfect launchpad for a nation-branding strategy that Estonia’s national enterprise agency had already been preparing in any case: ‘Brand Estonia: Positively Transforming’ sought to reposition Estonia as a future-oriented, high-tech Nordic country and distance it from the ‘Soviet’ stereotypes that were still being projected on to it in Western eyes.
Whether or not, as Paul Jordan debates, ‘Brand Estonia’ really resonated with the Estonian public, Eurovision gave Estonia a springboard for its nation-branding that other broadcasters, and even governments, in central and eastern Europe couldn’t fail to notice. That mattered all the more in the context of the EU accession process, when getting recognised as a member or even a candidate meant showing that (as per a logic which set up western Europe as the supreme benchmark of progress) your country was ‘catching up’ with the West.
Ukrainian marketing agency CFC Consulting certainly had noticed, and according to Jordan – who interviewed both Estonian and Ukrainian Eurovision decision-makers for his doctoral research – the agency was instrumental in persuading the Ukrainian broadcaster NTU to start showing and participating in the competition.
The format of Eurovision, where winning countries’ broadcasters get the right to host, meant cities like Tallinn in 2002 or Riga in 2003 could become the symbolic centre of Europe for a night, answering back to western Europeans’ doubts about how ‘European’ their countries even were. In Riga, Turkey joined the debut winners’ roll of honour with Sertab Erener’s ‘Everyway That I Can’ – which packaged the erotic appeal of ‘harem’ stereotypes and the trendy sound of ‘Oriental R&B’ production into the first ever winning entry to be inspired by Balkan and eastern Mediterranean pop-folk.
To represent Ukraine in Istanbul, NTU (and CFC Consulting) found their perfect ambassador in Ruslana Lyzhychko – who had been developing her own ambitious ethnopop project based on repackaging the folklore of the Hutsul people of western Ukraine since 2002.
The Hutsuls and their supposedly timeless village lives in the Carpathian mountains – in the part of Ukraine that wasn’t occupied by the USSR until 1939 – have been romanticised and arguably objectified for decades as what the ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky calls the so-called ‘“wild folk” of Western Ukraine’. Sonevytsky, whose 2019 book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Ukrainian cultural politics, starts her look at Ruslana’s ‘Hutsul project’ with Ruslana’s 2002 video ‘Znaiu ya’ (‘I know’).
Through what was then the most expensive music video ever produced in Ukraine, ‘Znaiu ya’ put Ruslana in the position of an explorer discovering the hidden secrets of Hutsul culture and conveying them to her audience, heralding a new stage in her career.
Musically, ‘Znaiu ya’ already exhibits some of the key features Ruslana carried over into her 2004 Eurovision entry ‘Wild dances’, including the loud calls of the Hutsul ‘trembita’ at the beginning, rhythms based on the traditional foot-stamping dances of Hutsul men, and beats accentuated by Ruslana’s tambourine. So did the rest of her 2003 Ukrainian album ‘Dyki tantsi’, which gave her Eurovision project its name.
What represented a small and exoticised part of the nation in a Ukrainian context, however, turned for the purposes of Eurovision into an exoticisation of Ukrainian culture itself. Ruslana’s image for the 2004 contest brought fur and leather costumes, fiery backdrops and ‘tribal’-style motifs together to create an ‘Amazon’ persona inspired by the mythologisation of Scythian warrior women who had lived in other parts of what is now Ukraine.
Many viewers outside Ukraine likely associated the look with Xena: Warrior Princess. And if we’re talking about exoticism and folk music from the Black Sea they’d have been more right to do so than they might have known, since (as another ethnomusicologist, Donna Buchanan, points out) the composer of Xena’s theme song, Joseph LoDuca, had himself been inspired by the polyphonic Bulgarian women’s singing which had become one of the most popular musical phenomena from this region on the 1990s world music scene.
Ruslana won Eurovision 2004 with a record-breaking score of 280 points (in a year when the introduction of a semi-final meant more countries could vote in the final than ever before), bringing Kyiv the chance to follow Tallinn, Riga and Istanbul and rebrand itself in western European eyes.
Four months later, though, Ukraine’s presidential election run-off led to mass demonstrations in Kyiv’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), when authorities declared that the sitting prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, had beaten the opposition coalition’s leader Viktor Yushchenko and opposition supporters believed it was a fraudulent result.
We won’t stand this, no, revolution is on, ’cause lies be the weapon of mass destruction
Protestors occupied the Maidan until the result was overturned, taking Yushchenko’s campaign colour of orange as the symbol of their movement. Entertainers and public figures who supported the ‘Orange Revolution’ constantly visited the Maidan to keep up protestors’ morale, including the then-unknown hip-hop band GreenJolly who had recorded an anthem for the protests, and also Ruslana herself.
NTU’s selection process to choose the host entry for Eurovision 2005, with 45 announced acts across 15 semi-finals, had started in November 2004 before the Orange Revolution had even begun. By the time Ukraine’s Supreme Court had ordered a repeat run-off election and the Electoral Commission had declared Yushchenko the winner in January 2005, more than half of the heats had already taken place.
For the final on 27 February 2005, GreenJolly and three other acts were controversially given wildcards to go straight into the final, with GreenJolly performing their Orange Revolution anthem, ‘Razom nas bahato’.
Controversially, and reportedly at the behest of Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, GreenJolly won the final ahead of the prior favourite Ani Lorak, who was seen as a Yanukovych supporter – ensuring that the narrative of the Orange Revolution would carry directly into the competition. Eurovision’s rules against directly political messages meant that ‘Razom nas bahato’ had to take the lines about Yushchenko out of its chorus before it was allowed to take part.
The clips from the Orange Revolution that NTU inserted into GreenJolly’s pre-performance postcard, and the drummer’s orange shirt on stage, went a long way to making the connection clear.
More significant in Eurovision’s history than GreenJolly in the long run is probably how Ukraine and Kyiv approached hosting the contest, turning it into a touristic spectacle even more than had been the case with Tallinn, Riga and Istanbul. Throughout the week leading up to Eurovision, outdoor stages on the Maidan showcased Ukrainian musicians, and the government encouraged Western tourism by lifting visa requirements for EU visitors. The EU visitor visa regime was never reinstated after the contest, giving Ukraine an ongoing advantage over Russia in competing for tourists and their currency.
When Helena Paparizou won the Kyiv contest, her trophy was awarded by none other than Yushchenko himself, an unprecedented role for a head of state in a Eurovision final.
For almost a decade until the invasion of Crimea and Donbas forced Ukraine’s public broadcaster to miss the 2015 contest, Ukraine’s entries gave the country a trademark style at Eurovision that could be counted on to soar through the semi-finals and usually finished comfortably in the grand final’s top ten.
Show me your love, show me how much you care, talk to my heart, whisper my name
Most Ukrainian entries over the next few years followed a similar pattern, crafted to appeal to the public ‘televote’ that awarded 100% of the points in Eurovision until 2009: uptempo songs with a slight ethnopop flavour, built around female singers with assertive and sexually confident personas who were often already well-known in Russia and other neighbouring countries as well as Ukraine, and equipped with a new and unique staging concept every year.
Tina Karol’s ‘Show me your love’ in 2006 thus came with a crew of leaping ‘Cossack’ dancers who skipped rope during the instrumental break; Ani Lorak, three years after her disappointment in 2005, performed the fan-favourite ‘Shady lady’ in 2008 atop a set of giant light boxes; Svetlana Loboda brought shirtless gladiators, stiltwalkers, her own drum kit, and a set of three interlinked ladder/gyroscopes called the ‘Hell Machine’ to perform ‘Be my Valentine (Anti-crisis girl)’ on stage in Moscow in 2009.
Whether that crisis was the European financial crisis, the crisis following the Russian-Georgian war, or part of a Thunderdome far future was left to viewers’ imagination, and by the time gladiators were pulling Loboda’s drum kit across stage while she beat out a drum solo surrounded by Ukrainian flags, hardly anyone would have been asking anyway.
The celebrity culture that made Karol, Lorak and Loboda into entertainment personalities was often not to the taste of Ukrainian feminists, especially those who campaigned against the objectification of women, pornography and sex work. A co-founder of the controversial activist group FEMEN, who became internationally notorious in the early 2010s for their topless protests, told the feminists Olha Plakhotnik and Mariya Mayerchyk in 2010 that the media’s relentless sexualisation of female pop stars had even helped to inspire FEMEN’s own tactics:
I worked in show business for a year, and all this time I was curious why […] the work of civic organizations and civic movements is virtually unknown. […] But every one knows that, say, Tina Karol ripped her dress. And everyone is excited to look at that. The news of, I don’t know, say, Ani Lorak losing her panties is exciting. And every one is terribly excited about it.
In 2007, however, NTU had turned to a different corner of Ukrainian popular culture for its Eurovision entry, and delivered not just Ukraine’s second iconic representative but an act whose image has been taken up in Eurovision fan culture to symbolise the kitsch spirit of the 21st-century contest itself: Verka Serduchka, the creation of comedian Andriy Danylko, who like Ruslana had had a well-developed creative product at home before being chosen to translate it into Eurovision abroad.
‘Dancing lasha tumbai’, with its disco-ball uniforms, accordion riffs and semi-nonsense lyrics, is for many viewers the excess that defines Eurovision, and came second in Eurovision 2007 behind Marija Šerifović’s ‘Molitva’. As a cross-gender performance, Verka’s persona was also received by many viewers as one more in the line of Eurovision’s drag queens. In Ukrainian, and Russian, media culture, however, Verka had much more culturally specific meanings.
Verka, as portrayed by Danylko since the late 1990s, is a boisterous sleeper-train conductor swept along by the many transformations of postsocialist Ukraine, and speaking the mixture of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk, like many Ukrainians from her social background. As Sasha Raspopina writes, ‘anyone could name a “Serduchka” from their own lives’, not just in Ukraine but anywhere else which had been under Soviet rule.
At least until she came to Eurovision, Galina Miazhevich argues, Verka had less to do with Western practices of drag and more to do with the Soviet and post-Soviet form of subversive irony known as steb or stiob – though the very fact that Verka was a cross-gender character still led one Ukrainian parliamentary deputy to criticise her selection using anti-intersex terms.
Once at Eurovision, however, Verka and Danylko both found out she could also be seen through the lens of drag, and her post-contest album, Dancing Europe, closed out with a semi-remix of her entry titled ‘Evro Vision Queen’.
On top of all that, the song’s nonsense title and Verka’s naïve persona gave the entry just enough cover for Verka to repeatedly sing lyrics that sound very, very like the words ‘Russia, goodbye’.
Rather than argue about whether ‘lasha tumbai’ really was the Mongolian word for ‘whipped cream’ (supposedly no such phrase exists), the EBU of 2007 let it through.
I want to see ‘Russia, goodbye!’
Verka notwithstanding, Ukrainian Eurovision entries after 2007 didn’t go on to say ‘Russia, goodbye!’ at once – just as Russia continued to be an important TV and live performance market for many Ukrainian stars. Ani Lorak’s ‘Shady lady’ was composed by the serial Russian Eurovision entrepreneur Philipp Kirkorov, who represented Russia himself in 1995 and has moved on to produce six Russian and Moldovan entries since 2014.
(How involved he’ll be in future contests is another matter, though, especially with future Russian participation in question: Lithuania and Ukraine banned him from entering their countries in 2021, and Estonia in 2022, making an increasing number of potential host countries where he wouldn’t even be able to appear.)
In 2008 Lorak was Ukraine’s second Eurovision runner-up in a row in Belgrade, but Dima Bilan won the contest, meaning Moscow would host Eurovision in 2009.
Russia’s attack on Georgia in August 2008, between the two contests, turned even more of a political lens on to the 2009 contest than there would already have been given the fact that Eurovision had become well established as a space for simultaneously celebrating LGBTQ+ and national pride, whereas since 2006 every attempt to hold Pride in the Russian capital had been banned by Moscow’s mayor.
Georgia’s broadcaster, which had only started competing in Eurovision in 2007, at first declared it would withdraw from the Moscow contest, then changed its mind after winning Junior Eurovision in November 2007. Treading the same linguistic tightrope as Verka’s ‘Lasha tumbai’, Stephane and 3G’s ‘We don’t wanna put in’ left listeners in no doubt as to the fate it desired for the Russian leader; ordered to change the lyrics by the EBU, Georgian television withdrew instead.
Loboda’s Ukrainian flags planted in the Moscow stage, in contrast, were well within the rules: who can object to a national flag when Eurovision itself makes them integral to the contest’s visual identity? From 2022’s viewpoint, they might seem to assert much more resistance to neoimperial Russian ambitions against Ukrainian sovereignty than they necessarily did in 2009, yet all the ingredients necessary to make that interpretation were already present then.
Russia’s own entrant in 2009, meanwhile, was from Ukraine herself: Anastasia Prikhodko was born in Kyiv but had taken part in a series of the Russian talent show Fabrika zvyozd in 2007, as Ukrainian contestants used quite often to do. She had already been eliminated from the 2009 Ukrainian final, in circumstances that led to her suing the organisers, before entering the Russian selection process instead. Her entry ‘Mamo’ (‘Oh, mother’), with lyrics in both Russian and Ukrainian, became the Russian host entry.
A dark ballad about a young woman confessing her mother had been right to warn her against running away with an untrustworthy man, ‘Mamo’ has had its own retrospective interpretations projected on to it since Putin’s launch of a full-scale invasion aimed at bringing Ukraine back under Moscow’s control: could it even have been Mother Russia she was meant to be singing to? Prikhodko herself, however, remained in Ukraine, made two more attempts to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, and joined the Euromaidan protests in 2013-14; after Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 she gave up singing in Russian, and has been trying to build a political career with Yulia Tymoshenko’s party since 2018.
Ukraine’s entries in 2010 and 2011 continued with female soloists, though without the eroticism of the Karol/Lorak/Loboda years. Alyosha’s ‘Sweet people’ in 2010 was pitched as a warning against letting the world slide into environmental catastrophe, with a video filmed at Pripyat in the Chornobyl exclusion zone in Polesia – the first time a Ukrainian entry had alluded to the disaster that had fuelled many negative Western stereotypes of their country.
As much as it might have seemed to take Loboda’s ‘anti-crisis’ theme a step further, ‘Sweet people’ was only a last-minute, third-chance choice to represent Ukraine: NTU had first planned for a different artist, Vasyl Lazarovych, to sing Ukraine’s entry, then had to organise two different national finals in the space of a month, only for Alyosha’s original winning song to turn out to have been released before Eurovision’s eligibility deadline.
Mika Newton’s ‘Angel’, in 2011, nearly faced reselection as well after vote-rigging allegations, but the re-run was cancelled after the other two artists who would have been featured, Zlata Ognevich and Jamala, both decided not to take part. Newton’s staging featured a live performance by the Ukrainian sand painter Kseniya Simonova, whose appearances in Ukraine’s Got Talent had racked up a remarkable figure for the time of 2 million views.
For 2012, Ukrainian television knew that the country was about to be hosting a mega-event on an even greater scale than Eurovision 2005 – the men’s football European Championships, which Ukraine in co-operation with Poland had successfully bid for in 2005-7 (not that long after Kyiv had hosted Eurovision for the first time).
Welcome, girl and boy, take my hand, let’s enjoy
Ukraine’s preparations for Euro 2012 included major upgrades for the stadia in Kyiv and Kharkiv, two new stadia in Donetsk and Lviv, and new international airport terminals serving all four host cities to accommodate the tens of thousands of foreign fans who would be travelling unprecedented distances in a European football tournament to follow their teams.
(During the first phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-15, Donetsk’s airport became the site of a 242-day stand by Ukrainian troops who became mythologised in Ukraine as the ‘cyborgs of Donetsk’; Ukraine’s other airports are now all closed to passenger traffic and have been targets of Russian missile attacks.)
Gaitana’s uptempo entry ‘Be my guest’ doubled as a song of welcome for visiting football fans later in the summer, creating the same kind of sport/Eurovision crossover as the French entry in 2010, which France Télevisions also used as a theme for its coverage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Kyiv-born and with a Congolese father, Gaitana also stood out in Ukraine as Ukrainian showbusiness’s most prominent Afro-Ukrainian. The central structure, or central myth, of Eurovision as a competition between representatives of national musical cultures means that contestants don’t just perform their songs but take on the symbolic role of representing their nations. Players and fans of colour before Euro 2012 had already been expressing concerns about racism in Poland and Ukraine, and Gaitana herself had faced opposition from a member of the far-right Svoboda party, who attacked her song as sending ‘a vision of Ukraine as a country located somewhere in remote Africa’.
Within Ukraine, Gaitana’s star image has arguably involved a certain amount of self-exoticism around the African elements of her heritage (Adriana Helbig in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration, for instance, comments that Gaitana’s videos in the late 2000s projected a ‘hypersexualised’, ‘alluring and mysterious’ persona, leveraging associations between sexuality and Blackness and remediating Soviet-era notions of Africa as a faraway, exotic land).
On the Eurovision stage, however, her floral ‘vinok’ or wreath – traditionally worn by marriageable girls – framed Gaitana as equally as authentic a carrier of Ukrainian tradition and national womanhood as any white Ukrainian woman.
In its first ten years at Eurovision, then, Ukraine had already been energetically using the contest as a platform to define and communicate certain narratives of Ukrainian national identity – as hospitable, welcoming, creative, ‘wild’, but with a knowing ability to package that ‘wildness’ for Western tastes that proved Ukrainian creativity was at ‘European’ standards.
To many of the Ukrainian students and other members of the public Jordan interviewed in 2007-8, Ukraine’s early entries were quite clearly representing the culture of western Ukraine and sometimes appeared as an elite-driven, rather than popular, narrative of the nation. Debates within Ukraine about both Verka and Gaitana, in particular, continued to illustrate the ‘ambiguity and complexity’ of defining Ukrainianness itself.
Somewhat on a principle of ‘turn and turn about’, Ukraine’s national final in 2013 was won by Zlata Ognevich, one of Mika Newton’s unsuccessful contenders in 2011. Here too the delegation hired a Ukrainian known for something else to join the stage performance: Igor Vovkovinskiy, who carried the 1.65-m Ognevich on stage dressed as a medieval giant, then held the record as the tallest living person from both Ukraine and the USA (though sadly died in August 2021, aged 38).
Ognevich’s ‘Gravity’ was hardly the only Eurovision entry around that time to nod to fantasy medievalism, two years into Game of Thrones’s reign as a transnational cultural phenomenon, and it’s probably not fanciful to hear hints of Disney and Idina Menzel in there (Menzel having made her name with Wicked’s showstopper ‘Defying gravity’) even though Frozen was still six months away.
In 2013-14, Ukraine was about to go through even greater upheaval than the Orange Revolution – though, unlike in 2004-5, it would take several years to see its effects on the Eurovision stage.
Tick tock, can you hear me go tick tock?
For all the hopes of change that Ukrainians had invested in Yushchenko on the Maidan in 2004, in the long run public disaffection with politics after the Orange Revolution remained the order of the day. A rivalry had broken out between Yushchenko and his Orange Revolution ally Tymoshenko; ruling coalitions had repeatedly failed to form stable governments, causing new parliamentary elections; and in 2010 Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko’s opponent in 2004, defeated Tymoshenko in the presidential elections.
Believing in closer relations with Russia, Yanukovych changed his mind about signing an association agreement with the EU in November 2013: the activists who gathered on the Maidan to protest the decision, and the artists – including Ruslana again – who flocked to the Maidan to support them, were mobilising against Yanukovych for a second time.
(Ruslana was then the only Ukrainian Eurovision entrant to have served as a parliamentary deputy, representing Yushchenko’s faction in 2006-07; since the second fall of Yanukovych, Prikhodko represented Tymoshenko’s party in 2018-19 and Ognevich represented the Radical Party of Oleh Liashko in 2014-15.)
Between November 2013 and February 2014, the ‘Euromaidan’ protests escalated into what Ukrainians know as the Revolution of Dignity, as Yanukovych used increasingly authoritarian tactics against protestors and activists formed self-defence groups in response – a pattern of popular mobilisation which primed the Ukrainian public to react so quickly to Russian invasion in 2022, but also gave Ukrainian far-right movements an unsettling place in the revolution’s history, since their members had been among the first to be ready to fight.
On 21 February, after three days of activists marching on parliament under police sniper fire, Yanukovych signed a deal with the opposition calling for a unity government, and fled Kyiv the next day. A new government could be expected to distance itself from Russia again and move closer to the EU. Putin’s Russia considered the revolution to have been a coup d’etat, and Russian security services stirred up pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The first pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea took place on 23 February, the same day as the closing of the Sochi Winter Olympics, and on 27 February Russian special forces seized the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol so that the annexation could begin.
On 6-7 April, Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk started the process of declaring themselves independent republics. Fierce fighting in Donbas between Ukrainian forces and the separatist militias, which had covert Russian backing, broke out and lasted until the ‘Minsk II’ ceasefire in February 2015, though hostilities along the line of separation never ended, and more than 2 million people had fled the separatist-held areas.
None of this background was reflected in Ukraine’s 2014 Eurovision entry, which had been selected through a national final in December 2013. Unlike in 2005, no serious attempts were made to change it after the revolution – not only would time have been much tighter (Yanukovych was ousted in the last week of February, and Eurovision entries would have to be confirmed by mid-March), but the emergency in Crimea and Donbas was already breaking out.
Instead, Mariya Yaremchuk’s ‘Tick tock’ went down in Eurovision history as the performance which gave Måns Zelmerlow and Petra Mede’s ‘Love love peace peace’, then the 2020 Netflix movie, their man in a hamster wheel.
The escalation of the war in Donbas left NTU unable to commit to participating in Eurovision 2015 (leaving the Vienna contest ‘building bridges’ all the way to Australia while leaving out Ukraine) – so Ukrainian television’s first opportunity to communicate a national narrative in these new conditions would be 2016, when NTU launched a partnership with the commercial network STB. The outcome was another landmark in Ukraine’s Eurovision history.
Where is your heart? Humanity rise
With hindsight, the talent that both Jamala and her stage director Konstantin Tomilchenko poured into channeling the personal and collective emotions of ‘1944’, and our knowledge of what’s happened in Ukraine since then, might make it seem as if Ukraine would always have been the preordained winner of Eurovision 2016.
The pre-contest discourse, however, was much more about whether as contentious, divisive and politicised a song as ‘1944’ was widely seen to be could appeal to juries and audience members across the whole of Europe. Direct political messages are, of course, banned in Eurovision, as NTU had found with GreenJolly’s lyrics in 2005; Eurovision’s reference group had however concluded that ‘1944’ did not break the rules, presumably because it was not directly commenting on the politics of the day.
From academic perspectives on history and memory, of course, few things are more political than commemorating the past, above all when that past has immediate resonances with a conflict which is still going on: indeed, conveying a narrative of a conflict in the present by framing it as a continuation of a conflict that happened in the past is one of the most foundational discursive moves to look out for in studying historical memory.
As expansive as one might like the definition of ‘political’ to be in many other contexts, the fact that the reference group applied a much narrower definition worked in Jamala’s favour – and is probably important for creative freedom at the contest in a wider sense.
When necessary, Jamala could parry allegations that the song was political by explaining that it was about what her own Crimean Tatar great-grandparents had suffered in 1944 when her people were deported from Crimea. Any viewer knowing that Stalin had ordered those deportations and that Putin has looked to Stalinism as an era of lost Russian greatness, however, could already fill in the gaps with the present; while the song’s evocation of the traumas of ‘1944’, and Jamala’s skill in communicating vocal anguish, could also speak more widely to viewers across the rest of Europe whose own family histories had been scarred by the Second World War.
By the time of the contest, Jamala, whose grandparents were still living in occupied Crimea, could openly tell journalists that ‘of course [the song] is about 2014 as well’.
The song’s opening lines, graphic by Eurovision standards (‘When strangers are coming, they come to your house / they kill you all and say “We’re not guilty”’) deftly explained how Ukrainian public diplomacy would want European viewers to see through Russian disinformation about responsibility for violence in Crimea and Donbas. The chorus in Crimean Tatar incorporated allusions to a Crimean Tatar folk song understood as a protest against Stalin’s deportations (‘Ey, güzel Qırım’), and her virtuoso ‘melismatic wail’ over the sound of a duduk worked, as Sonevytsky explains it, to ‘include the Eurovision audience as co-participants in the experience of grieving, of experiencing anguish over loss’.
‘1944’ might well not have been organisers’ ideal winner in 2016: ‘Love love peace peace’, that contest’s legendary interval act, even joked that winning the competition with a song about war, like Abba’s ‘Waterloo’, ‘is not something we recommend’.
Yet in showing that a song with such complex emotions and politics could win, it arguably helped to make a step forward for the health of creative diversity at Eurovision – even if Kyiv hosting Eurovision 2017 meant that contentious public diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia was going to be at the centre of the contest’s politics for another year.
Time to find truth, time against the lies
Eurovision 2017 took place in a Ukraine which, since 2014, had seen sweeping government interventions against Russian-language media and remaining traces of Soviet public memory. A law in June 2016 introduced a quota for Ukrainian-language music and programming on Ukrainian broadcasters – similar to a move France made in 1994 to protect French culture from Anglophone competition, but particularly likely to affect Russian cultural products, in a context where Ukrainians experience Putin’s denials of Ukrainian nationhood as a continuation of 19th-century Russian imperial repression of Ukrainian linguistic and cultural expression.
(Since then, a further law in 2019 has defined Ukrainian as the only state language, and introduced further requirements on education and media in languages other than Ukrainian which operate most stringently for content in Russian.)
Becoming the first, and still only, city in central and eastern Europe to ever host Eurovision twice meant that Kyiv and Ukraine would not just be showing themselves off to ‘Europe’ again but illustrating how much had changed there since 2005 – while using the diplomatic platform of hosting the contest to counter Russian disinformation narratives about Ukraine.
O.Torvald, a rock band from Poltava, won Ukraine’s national final in February 2017 with the song ‘Time’ – a second Ukrainian host entry by an all-male group (in a year also featuring an unusually all-male presenter team), in contrast to the iconic female performances which had defined most of Ukraine’s Eurovision history to date.
O.Torvald’s national final performance featured the band playing in what appeared to be the aftermath of an explosion, with red ticking clocks seemingly implanted in their chests counting down a three-minute time limit and the frontman Yevhen Halych spreading his arms during the breaks as if waiting to be shot. When the song and countdown ended, the band members stood stunned as whatever was impending failed to happen, and the countdown at the back of the stage started ticking back up in green.
‘Time’ wouldn’t be the last occasion that Ukrainian Eurovision entries toyed with apocalyptic themes, but the rawness of the national final performance was significantly toned down for the contest itself: with a more abstractly dystopian vibe, the band performed in outfits that looked a little like futuristic chainmail in front of a giant, hologram-style head.
Compared to ‘1944’, or even O.Torvald’s original performance, reading politics into the version of ‘Time’ staged at Eurovision would have taken much more active interpretive work. The main political narratives of Kyiv’s hosting Eurovision were instead offstage. Questions over whether LGBTQ+ visitors would be welcome and safe in the Ukrainian capital were being intensively fielded by Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko, the British Embassy and British Council, and activists from Kyiv Pride, who were only just beginning to win municipal support for the marches they had been organising since 2013.
The slogan of Eurovision 2017, ‘Celebrate diversity’, could but did not have to allude to LGBTQ+ diversity as well as the diversity of national and ethnic cultures, and the same strategic ambiguity attended the city authorities’ decision to temporarily rename Kyiv’s late-Soviet-era People’s Friendship Arch the ‘Arch of Diversity’ and paint it in rainbow colours; this decoration would last through Eurovision and Kyiv Pride. (Far-right activists temporarily halted the paint job during Eurovision week.) The arch itself had been scheduled for dismantling since May 2016 under Ukraine’s new decommunisation laws, and in April 2022 Klitschko did order the sculpture of two friendly Ukrainian and Russian workers beneath the arch to be removed.
Post-2014 Ukraine’s policy of cultural separation from Russia, made in the context of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Donbas and its ongoing strategy of ‘hybrid war’, directly affected the 2017 contest when security services announced that the Russian representative Yulia Samoilova would not be allowed to enter Ukraine.
Dozens of Russian entertainers since 2014 who had taken stances in support of Putin or the annexation of Crimea had already been added to a ‘list of persons posing a threat to the national security of Ukraine’ compiled by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) and culture ministry, and Russians were also ineligible to enter Ukraine if they had made what Ukrainian law considered to be illegal visits to Crimea (travelling there directly from Russia, without crossing a Ukrainian border post).
Samoilova, who had been runner-up on Russian X Factor in 2013 and appeared in the opening ceremony of the Sochi Paralympics, was not an established enough star to have come to Ukrainian security services’ attention, but had performed in Crimea in 2015. The day after she was selected for Eurovision, the SBU announced that she could be banned from entry to Ukraine, causing a month-long stand-off that ended in Russia withdrawing from the 2017 contest.
The circumstances of the tussle over Samoilova, who has spinal muscular atrophy and performs from her wheelchair, left room for suspicion that those responsible for selecting her had exploited her disability for extra sympathy. Russia selected her again for Eurovision 2018, where her song became the only Russian entry to date not to qualify from the semi-finals – at the time leaving only Ukraine and Australia with a 100% qualification record.
Ukraine’s own 2018 entry, ‘Under the ladder’, might have caused technical headaches but at least not political ones: Mélovin began the song by bursting out of a hydraulic coffin ten feet above the stage, and ended it sitting at another of the gimmicks celebrated in ‘Love love peace peace’, a burning fake piano. (Retrospectively, Mélovin now figures as Ukraine’s first LGBTQ representative, having come out as bi while performing at a Kyiv music festival in 2021.)
The programme of cultural sanctions against Russia came back to bite Ukraine’s Eurovision participation in 2019, when Maruv won the national final but was forced to pull out because she was not prepared to sign a contract with UA:PBC agreeing not to perform in Russia for some months after the contest. In 2017-18, as Tatiana Zhurzhenko notes, the Ukrainian parliament had debated several proposals to directly ban or sanction Ukrainian artists touring in Russia, sparking wider discussion about whether such so-called ‘unpatriotic behaviour’ should be left to the music industry to regulate or governed by the law.
UA:PBC had made its stance on the matter unequivocal, and so had Jamala – who had put Maruv on the spot during the final by role-playing a Eurovision press conference and asking Maruv the ‘very uncomfortable question’ of whether or not she believed that Crimea was Ukraine.
As a result, Ukraine never found out whether Maruv would have kept up the country’s 100% qualification record – though the hypersexualised style of ‘Siren song (Bang!)’ might have gone somewhat out of fashion since Eurovision’s all-televote years.
Siyu, siyu, siyu, siyu zelenesenki
Before Covid-19 wrote 2020 into Eurovision history as the only year when the contest has ever had to be cancelled in almost seven decades, Rotterdam 2020 was already going to open a new chapter in Ukraine’s own Eurovision history – as the first time a Ukrainian entry had ever been performed solely in Ukrainian.
Jamala’s lines in Crimean Tatar and Verka’s phrases in German and Surzhyk aside, every Ukrainian entry since 2006 had been wholly in English; Ruslana had sung predominantly in English with some words of Ukrainian, and even GreenJolly had mixed Ukrainian and English together.
‘Solovey’, by the electronic folk band Go_A, both updated Ukraine’s reputation for repackaging folklore as expertly-crafted Eurovision spectacle into the 2020s, and helped to express a creative spirit that Zhurzhenko has described as a ‘cultural revolution’ in Ukraine since Euromaidan.
This creative revival was characterised, Zhurzhenko writes, by ‘the active role in the long-due reforms claimed by a new generation of artists, cultural managers and activists, the redefinition of the very notion of Ukrainian culture (such as reclaiming the Ukrainian contribution to what is usually labelled Russian avantgarde and Soviet modernism), the growing understanding of Ukraine as a multicultural polity and, finally, the new appreciation of Ukrainian culture as an instrument of soft power’ – just as Jamala had proven in 2016.
Founded in 2012 by keyboardist/percussionist Taras Shevchenko (who shares his name with Ukraine’s national poet), Go_A’s four-piece membership also includes guitarist Ivan Hryhoriak, folkloric multi-instrumentalist Ihor Didenchuk, and the hypnotic vocals and stage presence of Kateryna Pavlenko, who learned traditional ‘white voice’ singing from her grandmother during her childhood in Polesia and trained in folklore at Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts.
How the transfixing production of ‘Solovey’ would be translated on to a Eurovision stage was one of the most anticipated questions of the 2020 Eurovision season – until the contest was cancelled and Go_A’s participation was rolled over to 2021.
Eurovision 2021’s standing as an instant classic in the contest’s history owes much, of course, to the collective emotions of being able to come together once again and share in the rituals of the Eurovision year – but also, perhaps, to the fact that the many acts from 2020 reconfirmed for 2021 had had months longer than usual to prepare their songs.
Go_A were no exception, and worked on three different options before settling on ‘Shum’, a song they had released online in January 2021. Trimmed to fit into Eurovision’s three-minute time limit and differentiate itself more from the traditional folk song about awakening the spring which had inspired it, the Eurovision version of ‘Shum’ premiered in March with a video reimagining the spring ritual as a post-apocalyptic rave, filmed in forests near the vicinity of Chornobyl.
Second only to Måneskin in the public vote at Eurovision 2021, and indeed in the contest’s year-end global streaming stats, ‘Shum’ captivated its audience from Kateryna’s first note through to its ever-accelerating finale – while, as with Ruslana and Xena, any resemblance one might have perceived to the style of The Matrix very much worked in its favour too.
Even in strictly musical terms, following up on the phenomenon of ‘Shum’ in 2022 might have seemed a nigh-impossible task – though that didn’t deter Didenchuk, who re-entered Ukraine’s national selection in 2022 as the flute-player of his other band, Oleh Psiuh’s folk/rap project Kalush Orchestra.
Remember your ancestors, but write your own history
Since ‘1944’ and its response to the Russian annexation of Crimea, at the very latest, Eurovision has represented an explicit, not just implicit, site of Ukrainian public diplomacy, on top of the role it has had as a platform for communicating narratives of Ukrainian national identity ever since 2003-4.
(With that public diplomacy function in mind, in fact, Jamala’s infamous question to Maruv – as coercive as it seemed on the night – might not have been an unrealistic reflection of the role that Ukrainian TV would have expected a national representative to play in the Eurovision press circus.)
After weeks when Russian forces had been massing at the Ukrainian border, Ukraine and its allies were already on high alert for an imminent invasion when the national final took place on 12 February. Knowledge of what might be to come gave the competition a sombre extra layer of meaning: as well as competing for the right to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, would they also be auditioning for no less than the role of begging allies to save their very nation if the worst warnings came true?
Kalush Orchestra and their tribute to Psiuh’s mother Stefania came second on the night behind Alina Pash, another 1990s-born musician who experiments with fusions of rap and Ukrainian folklore. Pash’s song ‘Tini zabutykh predkiv’ combined strategies that both Jamala and Ruslana had used in winning entries: Jamala’s emotional intensity of describing her own family history in the context of national tragedy, and Ruslana’s ability to present herself as a mediator of Carpathian and Hutsul folklore for a modern age.
The song shared its title, translating to ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, with the famous film directed by Sergei Parajanov in 1964-5 which re-romanticised the Hutsuls of western Ukraine – and which influenced Ruslana’s Hutsul project to such an extent that the trembita calls introducing ‘Wild dances’ follow very closely the calls over the title sequence of Parajanov’s film.
As a historical narrative, it referenced a free Ukrainian people dating back to pre-Christian times, the early Slavic form of popular assembly known as the ‘viche’, and the role of the hetmans and Cossacks in defending their land – thus directly resisting the imperialist narrative of Ukrainians as a people without history that Putin’s propaganda had been carrying abroad, and arguing that the Ukrainian people had a claim to the land dating back centuries further than the claims of any Russian-centred state.
Its English-language rap section vocalised Pash’s creative identity and patriotic duty to her people as aligned with the work of Dumas, Dante, Picasso, Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm – suggesting Ukraine belonged equally at the centre of European high culture, and touching off the national cultural reference points of almost as many countries as Zelenskyy has managed to address in his own televised addresses to the leaders and parliaments of the liberal West. Her performance ended by projecting a map of Ukraine in its internationally recognised borders, including the whole of Crimea, plus Donbas.
‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ practically foretold itself playing out as the winning reprise of Eurovision 2022, in other words – until it started being reported that Pash had committed one of the cardinal sins of post-2014 Ukraine’s ‘cultural revolution’ by illegally visiting Crimea herself in 2015.
Vidbir’s rules, on paper, should have prevented the national selection being derailed by a second Crimea scandal in three years, since all artists were expected to confirm that they had not performed in Russia or crossed through it to visit Crimea since 2014. As the authenticity of documents her team had shown UA:PBC about her visit started being questioned, Pash pulled out of Eurovision of her own accord.
Ten days later, Ukraine’s representatives for 2022 were finally confirmed as Kalush Orchestra – who had been vocal since the final about irregularities they believed had taken place in the jury vote, which had narrowly awarded Pash victory in the first place.
Two days after that, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began – and Mama Stefania, like so many suffering mothers and grandmothers in the wartime media of this and other conflicts (not least the Yugoslav wars), has come to symbolise the suffering of the Ukrainian nation as a collective.
Psiuh’s promise to his mother that ‘I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed’, means something else altogether when millions of Ukrainians are separated from their loved ones by ruined roads and bridges or by battle lines: as Psiuh told the Associated Press from Turin, ‘After it all started with the war and the hostilities, it took on additional meaning, and many people started seeing it as their mother, Ukraine’.
‘Stefania’ itself, meanwhile, is already soundtracking more than 150,000 TikTok videos, many of them showing the new daily life of Ukrainian social media users who have joined the military or relaying the ubiquitous videos of Ukrainian tractors towing away abandoned Russian tanks. When Ukrainian scholars reflect on the culture of everyday life in wartime (as Croatian scholars found themselves having to do three decades ago), Kalush Orchestra’s song would already have been part of the story even if the band had never gone to Turin.
Even if all roads are destroyed
By giving the band members permission to leave Ukraine to promote their entry internationally and to perform in the contest live (which almost all of them took up – only the net-wearing hypeman, Johnny Strange, stayed behind in Ukraine’s territorial defence, to be replaced for Turin by Salto Nazad’s Sasha Tab), the Ukrainian state has acknowledged how important Eurovision has been as a platform for articulating Ukrainian diplomatic narratives and 21st-century interpretations of Ukraine’s national cultural identity, not just in 2022 but ever since Ukraine started taking part.
For Ukraine in 2022, like Bosnia in 1993, the platform that competing in Eurovision affords a nation at war is more significant than the part any one musician could play in military ranks – and, unlike in 1993 (when Bosnia only received votes from the Italian, Turkish, Belgian, Maltese, French and Irish juries, and came 16th), the votes of a transnational public which has mobilised in remarkable solidarity with Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion will account for 50% of the points.
Having only declared independence from Yugoslavia at the beginning of March 1992, however, Bosnia-Herzegovina never had the chance to function as a peacetime state before its war began (and even though Yugoslavia had been competing in Eurovision since 1961, TV Sarajevo had been far less successful in steering representatives through the national selection process than the TV studios in Ljubljana, Belgrade or Zagreb). Ukraine’s independence is three decades old, and artists in their late 20s like Psiuh do not even have living memory of a time when Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule.
With a critical eye towards how national identities are constructed and represented, Ukraine’s record in Eurovision offers much to unpick. Although Russian is an everyday language for many Ukrainians (up to and including Zelenskyy), Ukrainian entries have never featured more than the odd Russian word.
The cultural centre of gravity for Ukrainian entries has often tacked towards the nation’s west as if it represents the whole of the country, while arguably writing out the histories of non-Ukrainians in western Ukraine (including Jews, Poles, Armenians and Roma, Sonetvysky notes in Wild Music) who have also been objectified and oppressed.
The wide-ranging extent of Ukraine’s post-2014 laws on national language and ‘decommunisation’ are open to critique – though the level of aggression against Ukraine from Putin’s Russia has influenced some Russian-speakers to switch more towards Ukrainian in daily life, all the more so since the full-scale invasion began.
As far as Eurovision is concerned, meanwhile, Ukrainian entries have used the contest for political ends, and have tested the limits of its rules against political messaging again and again – though the EBU has never disqualified any Ukrainian entry on political grounds. Ukraine’s national selections have often seemed to privilege perceptions of suitability for Eurovision above the appearance of a transparent selection, and 2022 was scarcely the first time that participants distrusted the result. Indeed, without speaking Ukrainian I don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the patronage networks within Ukrainian entertainment and media circles that would put the relationships between performers and producers in more context.
As of the beginning of May 2022, Ukraine has still qualified from every semi-final it has appeared in – yet beneath that headline record, Ukraine didn’t even get to perform an entry in 2015 or 2019, for reasons far beyond the broadcaster’s control the first time but well within them in 2019.
Nevertheless, without the creativity of Ukrainian musicians and designers, each responding to the politics of 21st-century Ukraine in their own way, Ukrainian Eurovision delegations would never have had the wherewithal to pursue public diplomacy objectives through the contest so effectively. While broadcasters select their entries with certain strategic objectives in mind, it’s primarily the music and performance of Ukrainian contestants which have defined what Eurovision viewers come to expect from Ukraine, and Ukraine’s most iconic Eurovision entries have been those where the entrants themselves brought most creative vision of their own.
In an unmissable address to the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies’ annual conference in April 2022, Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London and a historian of gender and nationalism in 20th- and 21st-century Ukraine, asked her audience of scholars of eastern Europe: where is Ukraine on the international academic community’s ‘mental maps’?
As ‘the largest state in Europe,’ Khromeychuk points out, Ukraine has taken its rightful place since 1991 on geographical maps, even with its cities misspelled or an unnecessary definite article inserted before its name. And yet, on Western scholars’ mental maps, Ukraine has largely remained colonially subsumed by versions of Russian culture which imperialistically appropriated it, or torn between Russia and NATO as simply a pawn in a greater geopolitical game.
The worlds of sport, fashion and technology have all offered counter-narratives to that erasure – yet out of all the forms of international exchange and co-operation Ukraine has participated in since becoming independent, participating in Eurovision is where Ukraine has staked its place most forcefully and inextricably on an international public’s mental maps. 21st-century Ukrainian cultural politics might not have been quite the same without Eurovision – but 21st-century Eurovision would certainly not have been the same without Ukraine.
Call for papers: Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans
Edited by Catherine Baker
This companion or handbook seeks to provide a comprehensive introduction to the vibrant and interdisciplinary field of research into popular music and politics in the Balkans, explaining the state of key questions and debates which have shaped the field so far while also signalling the many new developments and directions that have emerged in response to recent political, socio-economic and cultural dislocations.
Recognising that both ‘popular music’ and ‘the Balkans’ represent categories with extremely fluid and contested boundaries – and that struggles over them have been a central concern for many scholars of the topic – the volume understands both concepts very broadly: ‘popular music’ can encompass any music which interacts with mass media and entertainment in some way, and the volume will not impose a prescriptive geographical definition of ‘the Balkans’ – all contributors who perceive their topic as relevant to debates about popular music and the Balkans are welcome to express interest, even if its geographical area would not fit neatly within all concepts of ‘the Balkans’ as a space. Equally, some chapters might not necessarily centre on activities which their practitioners would define as ‘popular music’ if they help to illuminate the contexts in which popular music and the politics surrounding it are and have been experienced in the Balkans and its diasporas.
Chapters in the volume will be up to 8,000 words long (including references) and must not have been previously published. Reflecting the many scholarly lenses that have contributed to the study of popular music and politics in the Balkans, the disciplinary range of the volume is likely to span, but not be limited to, history; sociology; anthropology; ethnomusicology; media and cultural studies; popular music studies; performance studies; visual and audiovisual studies; cultural heritage; politics and international relations; languages and literatures; and perspectives from music practitioners. The volume is in development and is subject to submission of a successful proposal to Routledge at the beginning of 2022.
Within this general call for contributions, some topics where proposals would be particularly welcome at this stage of developing the volume include:
Historical examples from periods earlier than 1945
Popular musical connections with the Global South during state socialism
Fresh approaches to well-known developments of the 1990s (e.g. ‘world music’ and postsocialism; music and the Milošević regime in Serbia)
Neotraditional musicians as populist political actors
Music and left-wing/anti-fascist activism (e.g. ‘new left’ social movements; anti-fascist rap and Pavlos Fyssas)
‘Global Blackness’, and/or articulations of Blackness in Balkan contexts, through popular music
Impact of mobile and digital technologies, including Spotify and other streaming platforms
The political economy of touring, recording, television and/or airplay
New perspectives on Romani expression and activism through popular music
Jewish participation and presence in popular music
Popular music and COVID-19
To express interest in contributing, please ideally send a working title, a 250-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note to Catherine Baker (cbakertw1@googlemail.com) before 30 November 2021. If you are seriously interested in contributing but would not have time to submit a full abstract due to heavy institutional workload or care pressures during the pandemic, please send a working title and an informal note of what you would propose to contribute, plus a link to a relevant previous publication of yours if applicable.
Estimated timeline:
Abstracts due 30 November 2021
Authors notified 17 December 2021
Final proposal submitted to Routledge 31 January 2022
It’s the Saturday night of the Millennium journal’s conference on race and racism in International Relations, and four of us from our panel on race, Yugoslavia, India and Non-Alignment have walked up the back ways of Holborn in the October night looking for a place where we can sit and drink; a cramped, semi-underground Indo-Chinese cocktail bar has its back door open (I later found out it was called ‘Bollywood Stories’), and we settle around a small cellar table under the stairs, Srđan, Jelena, Aida and I, one candle flickering between us, contemplating what we don’t have to say out loud about the vote there’s just been in this country and the vote there’s about to be in the USA, and where what we know about what we don’t have to say comes from;
Four months earlier, it’s the day after that referendum, I’ve been away in Newcastle at a feminist international relations conference, up till 4.30 am until I couldn’t take any more of Nigel Farage grinning about bullets ten days after a white nationalist had shot Jo Cox dead in the middle of the street, and the group of us from my department who sometimes go for a drink after work have mutually agreed we need one tonight. We’re all white men and women from various parts of England, two from Hull, one from Derbyshire, me from the South (or maybe there are five of us, and our colleague who’s Australian is there as well); and soon after I’ve dropped my bag at home and found them in the large back room of one of the pubs near work, we’ve got on to constitutional implications, and I’ve said ‘Scotland’s gone’ without missing a beat; and someone or everyone says ‘Really?!’ because my consciousness has made a leap theirs hasn’t yet. (A few days later I think through all the resonances of constitutional fragmentation and ethnicised polarisation from the break-up of Yugoslavia that the atmosphere before and after the referendum is evoking, in an essay for LSE’s European Politics and Policy blog that comes out in one sitting about fourteen hours long: it comes to about 7,000 words.)
The astonishingly wise, frank, raw, and honest series of daily blog posts that Aida, Jelena and Srđan have edited all month at The Disorder of Things calls a foreknowledge based on living through the disintegration and destruction of Yugoslavia ‘Yugosplaining’:
At the time, the Yugoslav wars and their extreme violence were viewed by the West as idiosyncratic, isolated events, unrelated to broader process of political and economic transformation in the world – the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of communism. Indeed, they were just outright inconvenient for the world that celebrated the end of history. Yugoslavia, once deeply entangled with both the East and the West and even more so with the Global South, was all of a sudden isolated from history – including its own.
Yet now, as the West (and the allegedly democratized East) unravel under the weight of their own unresolved histories – and not just of the successive lost wars, financial crises or the pandemics – it seems that the ghosts of the 1990s are back to haunt us. Nationalism, ethnic and racial violence, populism, militias, lies and conspiracies can no longer be viewed as “the Balkan” phenomena. Instead, “the Balkans” now appears as the vanguard of a common catastrophe (Subotić, Hemon).
The aim was twofold: first, to use the authors’ lived personal experience of Yugoslavia as a way of explaining our lived political experience elsewhere. Second, to reclaim the narrative of our own lives rather than be made subject to outsiders’ accounts.
Decades after its demise, Yugoslavia continues to act as an open wound. We live what Saida Hodžić wrote in her essay – “if home is a wound that splits open the world, the world neither stays open nor heals over.” Therefore, this series was not designed to explain what Yugoslavia was, what it meant to whom, who it included or excluded, or how it came apart or why. It was, instead, designed to explain our current moment – that world split open – through the experience of our past.
These are knowledges that, working in the Western academy, the contributors have seen painfully silenced again and again by Western presumptions about what happened in ‘the Balkans’ and what ‘the Balkans’ must have been like for it to happen there, as Aida, Azra Hromadžić and Saida Hodžić all painfully record.
I felt none of Yugoslavia’s break-up on my body. My experiences of the wars were mediatised backdrops to everyday pre-teen routine, as a racial- and ethnic-majority subject of a nation that was setting itself up as a humanitarian donor, diplomatic negotiator and conditional peacekeeper (which measured its contributions by the risk to British, not Bosnian, lives): a newsreader on my mother’s radio in the kitchen saying tanks had crossed the Slovenian border; the War Child appeal and ‘Miss Sarajevo’ on Top of the Pops; an Evening Standard headline about Srebrenica at the station, and footage of disarmed Dutch soldiers on the six o’clock news by the time I came home from school.
And yet the ways I’ve tried to understand how the wars became possible and what they did to everyday life have done something to my subjectivity, to the deep premises I know about how societies and international politics work, about how people come to see others as enemies, and the myths they tell about the future and the past.
As a PhD student, I wanted to understand how a music industry like Croatia’s could have separated itself from Yugoslavia so quickly, and how it had been part of transforming everyday public consciousness in the ways that the Croatian anthropologists and ethnomusicologists I’d started reading during my Masters haddocumented at the very beginning of the war. Stitching together the Croatian war of independence and its aftermath, day by day, over one long spring and two long summers in Croatia’s national library (year by year in reverse, so 1990 came last every time, and then it was back to the then-present with another newspaper or showbusiness magazine), the slippage of political deadlock into armed clashes into something ever worse was not the sudden blaze of Western book covers and documentary title screens; how would I know if this were only a few months away?
More of what I know about living through those years comes from deep listening. In my postdoctoral work, I interviewed thirty-odd Bosnians and other ex-Yugoslavs about the work they’d done as interpreters and translators for foreign peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, during and after the war. Some would have been direct contemporaries of Danijela Majstorović, who wrote about her own and her research participants’ migration in another of the Yugosplaining essays; we somehow missed each other during my research visits (we’re still not sure how). I must have been in Priština, where I’d gone to interview a former British military linguist for another strand of the project, just as former Bosnian interpreters were responding to a post I’d made in a Facebook reunion group about setting up interviews later in the year, when I was coming back from meeting an ex-KFOR interpreter someone had connected me to and the thought came to me: many of the people I’d been meeting had been languages students or languages graduates when the war came; so were most of my friends at the time; if something like this had happened where we lived [in a completely different global configuration of languages, statehood and power, of course; but that only came later], is this what we’d have done?
These are acts of imagination, just as everything I know about the region that used to be Yugoslavia is in some way a construction. It only sits inside my mind through scholarship; it does not sit in my bones. What do sit in my bones are the experiences and sensations of the scholarship itself – the work, the research, the presentations, the listening, the conversations, and all the imaginative backchannels that run while my frontstage does those things. Among the authors are friends, contemporaries, authorities, table-of-contents mates and tablemates, people to whom I strive to make my representations of Yugoslavia and its aftermath authentic and accountable, to whom I owe a responsibility to depict as much complexity as they can see.
In essays such as the piece by Dženeta Karabegović, Slađana Lazić, Vjosa Musliu, Julija Sardelić, Elena B Stavrevska and Jelena Obradović-Wochnik, writing as the Yugoslawomen+ Collective and using their own experiences as knowledge-producers and subjects who have waited to cross borders to think through how rhetoric about ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrants has changed since the 1990s, I hear echoes of dialogues that I’ve joined in as well in conference corridors and email exchanges, working through this last decade’s reckoning with racism and the global legacies of colonialism from where we each are:
The post-Yugoslav space from which people once fled, and from which they still continue to migrate, is now also known as a ‘transit’ zone for those fleeing ongoing violence elsewhere. The region once known for ‘the Yugoslav wars’ is now ‘the Balkan Route’, the EU’s imagined ‘Badlands’, the outer periphery where border security funds are channelled to prevent the onward migration of racialised ‘others.’ The so-called ‘Balkan route’ became an alternative once the sea crossings were deemed too dangerous; today, it has become so entrenched in the violence of EU’s border-keeping that just one monitoring group in the region has recorded more than 700 reports of police brutality and asylum denials, with 70% of incidents reportedly taking place in Croatia.
Countries of the former Yugoslavia, most notably Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, whose ‘good migrants’ have often managed to leave the region and arrive in relative safety to countries of the Global North, are now implicated in the EU’s border-keeping to the extent that they regularly participate in the violent ‘push backs’ of men, women and children from the EU’s external border. Their aspirations to ‘Europeanness’, understood primarily as EU membership, are exercised through the protection and legitimization of the European superiority, even though their own citizens’ mobility within the EU is limited. […] The region is, thus, simultaneously othered and implicated in further othering in migration discourses. These racialised and classed hierarchies of people on the move are perpetuated, despite thousands of people from the post-Yugoslav space continuously lining up in front of EU and other Global North countries’ embassies or looking for ways to get EU citizenship so they can migrate more easily.
Something has, or somethings have, committed all of us to perceiving Yugoslavia and the violence of its collapse, and the systemic violence emanating in all its global forms from Europeans’ enslavement of Africans and colonisation of Indigenous lands, as part of the same world.
(The very question of who feels able to write themselves into a ‘Yugoslav’ past is shaped by such power relations, as Vjosa noted at the beginning of the series when explaining why she had participated in it as an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, and as Jelena, Srđan and Aida acknowledged in their conclusion: almost all its contributors came from South Slav backgrounds, and Yugoslavia’s failure to confront ‘the longer history of anti-Albanian bigotry’ in the region undercut its aspirations to ‘brotherhood and unity’ even before we weigh up how well it balanced the rights and interests of different South Slavs.)
Later in Azra’s essay, she writes of discussing her wartime experiences of being labelled as a Bosnian Muslim with inner-city Philadelphia schools, and trying to comfort disoriented students on her ‘Peace and Conflict in the Balkans’ class immediately after Trump’s election, as ‘openings’ that defy the ‘closings’ that have pressed on her in prestigious academic spaces: these openings are ‘transactions in sociopolitical life when “structures of feeling” were somehow transmitted and felt, almost understood, across the sociopolitical, geographic, and historical spectrum’. My own knowledge and I are the outcomes of many such openings, and are measured by them as well.
Three weeks after Srđan, Aida, Jelena and I sat together in Holborn, the US election result came in: overnight for them, first thing in the morning for me. Whatever else I’d been meant to do that day, the only thing I could do was write, a messy 3,000 words on coming to terms with how quickly queer people’s newborn rights could be taken away overnight, and why the result filled me as a queer woman with dread even an ocean away. (I re-used part of it when Cai Wilkinson was editing a special section of Critical Studies on Security and invited me to rework it as an essay I ended up calling ‘The filter is so much more fragile when you are queer’.
(One line I added to the piece for Cai has kept coming back into my head, this pandemic year: ‘There are people I know or used to know who will be dead in four years’ time.’)
My consciousness of my own nation and its past would not be what it is without learning about post-Yugoslavia for so long. Jelena (Subotić) writes, in her essay on citizens’ moral implication in the violence of Milošević’s Serbia or Trump’s USA, of our ‘larger, metaphysical responsibility as citizens who still benefit from structural racism or from structural inequality, or from structural anti-immigration policies. Even if we oppose them, by our own position in society we are implicated in them – an argument that goes at least as far back as Karl Jaspers’. To hope for a transparent reckoning with the past in Croatia or Serbia (I’d understood by the end of my PhD), it would be a double standard not to work towards the same in Britain – a country whose imperial and slave-trading past had systemic consequences around the world.
Knowing about post-Yugoslavia through the ‘openings’ I’d been part of for years, I suggested at the end of the queer in/security pieces, had made me more able to understand that Britain was not immune to the kind of authoritarian, nationalist future that now seemed to be coming to pass:
I know without having lived it that ethnopolitical conflict works like that.
The anxieties over ‘dilution’ or ‘undermining’ national cultural values that racists and xenophobes intensify in order to mobilise public support for restricting immigration work like that.
[…] Studying the Yugoslav wars since my early twenties, when all that preoccupied me at the time they were happening was making sense of the confusion with which I entered my own queer teens: I know identities wax strongest, turn from individual to collective, description to politics, when people believe or are led to believe that that identity is why they’re under threat.
I know it through compressing acres of wartime newsprint into weeks of research, through collecting hours upon hours of memories, through years of friendship and listening and solidarity, all breaking down my own filter of it-can’t-happen-here.
But I’d also suggested that having grown up queer, knowing that my belonging to the respectable majority would only ever be conditional, had made that filter more fragile and perhaps helped me to feel the solidarities I do:
There are freedoms I have in England or would have in America, which I didn’t even expect to enjoy as a teenager but which my queer elders won for me. In doing so, I gained a strange kind of everyday security with an uncanny contingency underneath – which I could lose again in ways that, if they were proposed for straight people, would be the stuff of dystopia, ‘some Handmaid’s Tale shit right there’.
(Dystopia still happens. But it takes so many more guns.)
Did knowing these kinds of insecurity with my own body make me more detachable from the idea that the territory–nation–culture nexus I was born in should automatically be a place of safety, progress and inspiration to the rest of the world – an idea that has so readily slipped into many Westerners’ belief that their knowledge is the most authoritative on ‘Balkan affairs’? I am wary of saying that queerness alone is enough to create an alliance – and yet if anything in my life has predisposed me to step away from the Anglophone West being at the centre of the world, that must be what it must be. (Did failing to fit the norms of heterosexual and class success at a school that was supposed to train girls to join Britain’s institutions of power do that?)
Without directly experiencing the Yugoslav wars, my consciousness of history, politics and security – of what can happen, and how it starts, and where it ends – has still been Yugosplained. Jelena, Aida and Srđan warn in their concluding essay, as our mood seemed to when we sat together:
Yugoslavia also carries a message for our friends and colleagues in the countries we now find ourselves in – believe in your exceptionalism – at your own peril; ignore your past – at your own peril; do not listen to Others amongst you – at your own peril.
My thoughts sit there too. And that sits in my bones.
Shortly after lockdown in Italy began, Italian apartment-dwellers started joining in co-ordinated singing from their balconies, including the song that had just won the Sanremo Music Festival and was still officially Italy’s entry for the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest. When it became clear that that too would have to be cancelled, Eurovision fans rallied together on social media to bind their sense of community back together by watching past contents online.
Both these ‘affects’ of lockdown presumed opposite relationships to space and gathering together than those on which Eurovision and other live televised events have relied for their emotional power. To illustrate that, consider how each contrasts with the seemingly unlikely note of sombreness and sincerity that Ermal Meta and Fabrizio Moro brought into the Eurovision grand final in 2018 when they performed that year’s Italian entry ‘Non mi avete fatto niente’ (‘You haven’t done anything to me’) –a song commemorating the hundreds of victims of the urban terrorism which had added undercurrents of fear to the everyday experience of city life for millions of people in the mid-2010s.
Alone on stage against a background of deep red spotlights and digital projections of their lyrics translated into fifteen languages, Meta and Moro named the sites of recent attacks in Cairo, Barcelona, Paris, London and Nice, with imagery more graphic than casual viewers would likely expect from a contest with so kitsch a reputation, and appeals to tolerance and religious reconciliation that tested the boundaries of Eurovision’s rule against political messages.
Moro’s intense gaze at the crowd, and the tightness of his fist clenched around his microphone stand, even seemed to make visible the unspoken knowledge that audiences, performers and fans had had to suppress since the Bataclan attacks and the Manchester Arena bombing in order to enjoy any live spectacle at all: it could have been any working musician, and any crowd.
Two years later, the song that would have been Italy’s Eurovision entry, Diodato’s ‘Fai rumore’, was instead being sung in unison by Italian city-dwellers from their balconies, joining in one of the only physical forms of community with a group larger than their own household that was open to them now that the severity of coronavirus in Italy had forced the country into Europe’s earliest and arguably strictest lockdown.
In Meta’s and Moro’s song, as in the discourses of the many European leaders who had had to react to mass-casualty attacks in their countries and cities over the previous few years, terrorism appeared to be motivated by religious intolerance and a blow struck against what their words implied was a shared way of life (in a transnational community extending through Europe to Cairo, though marked specifically as victims of Islamist terrorism compared to the effect it might have had to name Oslo or Utøya as well): its targets were members of the public taking part in the city’s everyday rituals of sociality and joy, in bars and shopping streets and concert crowds.
Against the geographic enormity of the globe, with ‘galaxies of people dispersed in space’, Meta and Moro sang, ‘the most important thing is the space of an embrace’. This intimate, commonplace comfort is now, for up to half the world’s population, against the law to share with anyone outside their household, and denied to those living alone at all – while the terrorist has all but vanished as a source of outdoor dread.
The everyday emotional and affective experiences of living through coronavirus lockdown are unprecedented for those who have been fortunate never to have lived under extended state curfew or a wartime siege, or to have had disabilities restricting them from taking part in public life outside the home; the context of a global, seemingly uncontrollable airborne pandemic is new even then. Together with the anxiety and, for growing numbers of us, the grief that the virus itself has brought, and with what it has meant for any of our working lives, our everyday affects and moods are governed by the politics and economics of our intimate space – the size and quality of our homes, who we live with and how, the gendered dynamics of power and even violence within households, and the structural factors that stratify access to private gardens and other amenities by race and class.
Even more so than in other emergencies, there can be no such thing as a collective experience of coronavirus when some have lived through it with those emotionally closest to them and others will have spent months without face-to-face conversation or touch.
National and transnational media, nevertheless, continue to be driven by a guiding logic of addressing – or inventing – a collective community, which (as Benedict Anderson first noted about the readership of national newspapers) was always too large by orders of magnitude for its members to have ever personally met. Even as multi-channel broadcasting, social media and streaming television have fragmented the mass audiences that television used to count on, media scholars have looked to live events and festivals as the sites where what Angharad Closs Stephens calls the ‘affective atmospheres of nationalism’ (and transnationalism) are most likely to be charged, in person, through the screen and on the keyboard or the phone.
But what happens to the ability of live music and sporting events to bring collective communities temporarily together and invite them to share the sentiments brought out by particular representations of national and transnational identity – the very thing that Eurovision researchers have long argued the contest is famous for – when they have depended on gathering crowds, presenters, participants and technical crew together in sizes that could be banned for months or even longer?
As sports teams and national governing bodies began to pull out of international fixtures even before governmental travel restrictions started making them impossible (one of the last fixtures involving an Italian team, Atalanta’s Champions League match against Valencia in Milan on 19 February, has been blamed for coronavirus outbreaks in both Valencia and Atalanta’s home city of Bergamo), Eurovision fans grew increasingly aware that the live contest in Rotterdam’s 15,000-capacity Ahoy Arena would not be able to take place as scheduled in the middle of May.
During the early stages of lockdown, as celebrities posted stay-at-home appeals from inside their own houses and bands found ways to play together while physically separated (Dubioza Kolektiv, the Bosnian band ‘sick of being European just on Eurosong’, have been streaming their weekly ‘Quarantine Show’ from their homes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia), fans speculated whether Eurovision could still go ahead with remote presenters and the pre-contest videos for what was already a complete slate of songs. The European Broadcasting Union, in charge of Eurovision, announced the inevitable on 18 March, recognising that the size of the event made it too complex to postpone for later in the year.
While the annual Eurovision broadcast brings a temporary affective community into being through television and social media for the length of the contest, fandom (or the many fandoms that now criss-cross various online and offline spaces) sustains an affective community year-round – where keeping up with and sometimes travelling to national selections and pre-Eurovision events as well as the contest itself is an annual ritual, and fans forge friendships, relationships, work and study plans (my own PhD on Croatian popular music and national identity wouldn’t have looked the same if the scandal of Severina’s 2006 Croatian Eurovision entry hadn’t happened in the middle of my research). Fandom’s annual anchor being cancelled for the first time in its history, without even a scoreboard to argue about in years to come, was one more blow in a collapsing social reality.
That weekend, journalist and Eurovision fan Rob Holley organised the first of what’s become a weekly synchronised watchalong of a past contest, #EurovisionAgain, to help fill Saturday nights – because, ‘why not come together every Saturday night and share the moment anyway’? First up was the Malmö contest in 2013, where most fans outside Sweden had first encountered now-legendary presenter Petra Mede; Athens 2006, Moscow 2009, Vienna 2015, Dublin 1997 and Helsinki 2007 have followed, with their own online voting countdown devised by Ellie Chalkley from fan site ESC Insight (for which I’ve written a few times), and the EBU even co-operating to stream new high-definition versions of the 2000s contests and help make older finals temporarily available online.
(Eurovision’s social media channel has also been sharing #EurovisionHomeConcerts where recent contestants share versions of their own and each other’s songs, and a special show on the original date of the grand final will celebrate this year’s entries and ‘link Europe through other familiar songs from the past, performed in iconic European locations’ – to end with a joint performance of the UK’s last Eurovision winner ‘Love Shine A Light’, to be seen on most participating broadcasters except the BBC, which will produce its own Eurovision celebration instead.)
After trying to detach from social media for the few Saturday nights of the lockdown, I joined in #EurovisionAgain for the Helsinki rewatch, livetweeting and making a short video explaining some of the background behind Marija Šerifović’s historic win.
Even watching a contest for the first time brings complex layers of memory and imagination together into the meanings viewers make out of what’s on stage – from memories of other contests and social experiences around those ritual times, to impressions of past or future travel to countries and cities involved, and narratives about international politics that we or the media project on to performances to affectively connect them with identities of ours (the way that Conchita Wurst’s victory in 2014 immediately became bound up with narratives of ‘Europe’ as a tolerant, LGBTQ-friendly space contrasted against ‘Russia’, after the Russian Duma had passed the so-called ‘gay propaganda’ law in 2013).
Rewatching a contest adds temporal distance to those layers of emotional meaning, on both personal and collective levels. In 2007, I was entering the last year of my PhD, and starting to draft the articles on Eurovision and pop-folk music I published in 2008 without knowing what a snapshot of that particular moment in the cultural politics of European integration they’d become, or that I’d still be actively researching Eurovision as an academic thirteen years later as a result of them; Šerifović’s win, for viewers with feminist or queer awareness and some knowledge of Serbian politics since then, may well call to mind the ‘tactical Europeanisation’ of the Serbian state’s shift towards securing Pride marches in the 2010s and the appointment of Ana Brnabić as the region’s first openly gay prime minister in 2017.
In the middle of a pandemic, the emotional experience of watching a past Eurovision might also contrast what each of us and our communities took for granted then with what it has become impossible to do now, with no certainty about when or how gathering in public will be safe again or crossing international borders will be allowed. Like the spectres that Meta’s pleading hands and Moro’s clenched fist brought into the undercurrent of his performance, these are affects that have to stay beneath our consciousness in order to feel the joy we probably turn to Eurovision for.
But it is the ways viewers have created affective experiences and rituals with each other around the annual rhythm of the contest, through digitally mediated communities, which have let those communities invent new rituals even when no live contest can take place at all.
My article ‘Postcoloniality Without Race?: Racial Exceptionalism and South-East European Cultural Studies’, which expands on ideas from Race and the Yugoslav Region about how ‘Orientalism’ has been applied to studying ‘the Balkans’, came out in Interventions.
I have a short essay in Critical Studies on Security about the aesthetics of embodying different imaginations of war and violence, and the pleasures of identifying with stars and characters who embody them, in Wonder Woman. (With an extra 4,000 words of literature review, this could have been a full-length academic article – but then I wouldn’t have had time to write it last year at all…)
My book chapter on the complex place of the Military Wives Choir(s) in TV entertainment, patriotic showbusiness, and everyday military life came out in Veronica Kitchen and Jennifer G Mathers’s volume Heroism and Global Politics – with its origins in a blog post I wrote here in 2012.
Guest posts for Prospect Online on the Croatian president’s self-promotion during this year’s men’s World Cup, for History Today on the problem of gender non-conforming ‘cross-dressing’ soldiers in history, for E-IR on the international politics of music video, for Discover Society on postsocialism and whiteness, for Imperial and Global Forum on the ‘Windrush myth’ after London 2012, for the German Historical Institute’s History of Knowledge blog on the silent histories of enslavement behind celebrating ‘Europe’ at Eurovision in Lisbon (reblogged by ESC Insight), for LSE Engenderings on integrating gender into historical research, for LSE EUROPP on Brexit, colonialism and Bosnia, and for ESC Insightagain on the queer politics of military kitsch.
In press for next year: a spin-off article from material that wouldn’t fit into Race and the Yugoslav Region about female pop-folk celebrity in south-east Europe, which has just been accepted by Feminist Media Studies; a review article for Contemporary European History about recent studies of peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo; a book chapter for The Palgrave Handbook on Languages and War where I reflect on interviewing ex-peacekeepers and interpreters about their work in Bosnia; and a contribution to a forum in New Perspectives on how postcolonial studies of postsocialism deal with class.
One or two more pieces on the aesthetic politics of popular culture and nationalism might also be ready by the end of 2019, not to mention the edited volume on ‘militarisation’, aesthetics and embodiment I’ve been coordinating this year.
Daniel Hannan MEP is not the first to compare the European Union’s role in international governance in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina to the exercise of colonial rule. Writing for Conservative Home on 14 November, the day Theresa May sought the approval of her cabinet on the UK’s draft Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, Hannan joined other pro-Leave critics of the agreement by arguing that it would leave Britain ‘facing colonial rule from Brussels, of the sort the EU imposed on Bosnia following the Yugoslav war’.
In criticising the EU’s political and financial interventions in Bosnia since the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in December 1995, Hannan might seem to put himself alongside such unlikely allies as the writers Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks, who drew attention to the EU’s ‘monumental neo-colonial transformation of [the Balkans] into a dependent semi-periphery’, or David Chandler, who used the phrase ‘empire in denial’ to describe international state-building in Bosnia and elsewhere.
Yet the country he compares to Bosnia is not Kosovo, where movements of Albanians and Serbs have both resisted the EU’s rule of law mission, or Greece, where Marxist economists during the bailout crisis accused Brussels of pursuing ‘a new type of colonialism’ against the European south, but the United Kingdom, the EU’s second largest economy and the country which once ruled the largest empire in the world.
While Britain’s part in world history is as the agent not the subject of colonial power, and its relationship to the EU has existed in a very different balance to Bosnia’s, post-Dayton Bosnia and Brexit Britain can in fact be connected into a common history of European coloniality – though not in the way Hannan suggests.
The EU’s role in Bosnia
There are, to be sure, valid critiques of EU governance in Bosnia when seen through a postcolonial lens. One might cite the ‘Bonn Powers’ that Dayton’s ad hoc Office of the High Representative (OHR) possessed to veto or dismiss elected officials for breaching the peace agreement, which were vested in the EU from 2002 to 2011 when High Representative and EU Special Representative were a ‘double-hatted’ role.
The EU has been responsible for military peace support operations in Bosnia since 2004, ran Bosnia’s international police mission in 2003–12, launched a business development programme called the Compact for Growth and Jobs in 2014 as its response to popular discontent expressed in that year’s plenum protests, reformed Bosnian customs and security services in order for Bosnia to play its part in fortifying EU external borders, and sets the conditions Bosnia must meet to progress through its EU pre-accession strategy.
Insights from postcolonial studies, especially the adaptations of Edward Said’s Orientalism that for two and a half decades have been helping to explain the importance of symbolic boundaries between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in south-east European collective identities, illuminate the ways that international and local officials, intellectuals and media appeal to the idea of Europeanness in making political claims. The EU and other international institutions scarcely invented hierarchical constructions of rational, liberal Europe against the backward ‘Balkans’, but embedded them even further into Bosnian political culture because of the EU’s power to determine whether or not Bosnia had met its conditions for reform.
The linguist Danijela Majstorović, for instance, writes that discourses of Europeanisation in OHR press releases during the early 2000s (including the particularly interventionist term of the only British High Representative, Paddy Ashdown), ‘represented, legitimised and coerced Europeanisation’ when they issued from an institution with powers like the OHR’s, reflecting ‘problematic relations […] of dominance in a sovereign country.’
The promise of integration into the EU in return for successfully implementing reforms serving the interest of neoliberal capital, Majstorović and Zoran Vučkovac argue, stripped the Bosnian public of the democratic political agency to pursue socio-political alternatives and constrained any forms of collective political identification beyond the three ethnic identities enshrined in Dayton. While the EU itself did not draft Dayton, its influence ensured the Dayton system stayed in place.
Even the very idea of European integration and enlargement has been argued, by postcolonial scholars such as Dušan Bjelić and Piro Rexhepi, to disavow the colonial pasts from which today’s ideas of ‘Europe’ emerged. Casting the European Union as a wholly new phase in Europe’s history, Bjelić suggests, permits its leaders and the publics who identify with it to disavow the overtly racist discourses of civilisational superiority with which ‘European’ culture was imagined when possession of an empire was the making of a ‘European’ power. It is in investigating this form of exceptionalism and disavowal where deeper connections between the EU, Brexit and post-Dayton Bosnia truly start to emerge.
Brexit and colonialism
Nostalgia for Britain’s imperial past has, indeed, characterised most of the Leave side’s enthusiastic imaginations of the prosperity post-Brexit Britain could supposedly enjoy. Speculations about replacing the EU with the USA as Britain’s main trading partner or creating a common ‘CANZUK’ free trade and movement area connecting Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, depend on imagining a 21st-century Britannia that commands as much diplomatic and economic power as when it ruled an empire, and whose prospective allies need her much more than she needs them. CANZUK advocates’ arguments that the British public would favour migrants from these white-majority settler-colonial countries, which they imagine as culturally closer than the eastern peripheries of the EU, expose the core of whiteness they place at the centre of British national identity even though they are positing a closeness which is supposedly independent of race.
The intellectual debt this geopolitical fantasy owes to ideas of federalising the white settler empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Duncan Bell and Srđan Vučetić suggest in a forthcoming article, exposes how deeply the idea of the ‘Anglosphere’ is and always has been racialised – and shows what boundaries CANZUK advocates are setting around the sovereign political community who, in Leave discourse, are entitled to and exercising their right to ‘take back’ political control.
Exaggerated visions of Britain’s importance in the world have not only informed Leave campaigners’ promises about post-Brexit trade but even, as Gary Younge suggests, the government’s negotiating strategy since June 2016 – a miscalculation that Britain could lay down the terms of the deal to Brussels, and an absence of any script for what to do when that turned out not to be true. For Nadine El-Enany, Brexit is ‘not only an expression of nostalgia for empire, but the fruit of empire’ – a policy that could never have come about if Britain had confronted the racism that still structures its present, thanks to its imperial past.
What is at stake in positioning Britain as the subject of colonial rule, not the power that exercised it, in rhetoric that seeks to persuade readers who identify with glorious myths of British sovereignty that accepting the draft Withdrawal Agreement would amount to colonial domination?
Bosnia has, in fact, already served Hannan as an example of what he perceives as the anti-democratic nature of the EU on several occasions – including a speech to the European Parliament in February 2014 using the same anecdote about a conversation with the High Representative (‘the colonial governor, so to speak’) as evidence of the ‘eternal gulf’ separating ‘the Brussels official’ from ‘the democrat’. His stance on Bosnia and the EU dates back to at least 2002, when he used Ashdown’s dismissal of the federal finance minister Nikola Grabovac to ask in the European Parliament ‘whether democratic standards will really be fostered in the new country when an unelected foreigner wields such arbitrary power in this manner’.
Hannan’s comments suggesting Britain would now be treated the same way as Bosnia came after other Leave politicians who had aligned themselves with nostalgia for a so-called ‘Global’ (instead of ‘European’) Britain had described the backstop deal as subjugation ill befitting Britain’s standing in the world. Almost a year earlier, Boris Johnson (then still foreign secretary) had argued that accepting all the EU’s regulations during a transitional period after Brexit would leave Britain as a ‘vassal state’. He repeated the phrase while the Cabinet were debating the Withdrawal Agreement.
The leader of another Leave faction, Jacob Rees-Mogg, alluded to an explicitly racialised motif of humiliation in stating that signing the agreement would leave Britain ‘not a vassal state but a slave state’ – a remark that the Labour MP David Lammy immediately criticised on Twitter as ‘trivialising the abuses of slavery’, based on an ‘ignorant nostalgia for Britain’s Imperial past’. Slaves, in the ‘Rule Britannia’ myth of sovereignty, are the very thing that Britons shall not be – a framework in which it is more shameful to be enslaved than to acquire generations of wealth from the sale, oppression and labour of human beings who were.
Evoking post-conflict Bosnia as a warning of what global status would await Britain if the backstop is agreed not only, as Jasmin Mujanović wrote on Twitter, trivialised the memory of the 100,000 people who lost their lives in the Bosnian war. The argument’s very internal logic requires disavowing the colonial past of Britain and other European powers while expecting the reader to sympathise with the unjustness of colonial rule.
Genuine parallels?
The threat of Britain ending up in the same ‘colonial’ relationship to the EU as Bosnia touches the emotions of imperial nostalgia because it implies a massive national fall from grace in the global hierarchy of which countries control their own destiny and which countries exist to have their destinies controlled. Such racialised hierarchies of power and entitlement have been translated, since the formal decolonisation of European empires, into the centre–periphery relations which inform Western Europe’s dealings with the Global South but also the East, and South, of Europe itself. In British imaginations, Britain does not deserve Bosnia’s fate.
Neither, of course, did Bosnia – and the diplomatic context that determined how the Bosnian war could be ended was itself shaped by British foreign policy, when the government of John Major and Douglas Hurd insisted the war was a matter of ‘ethnic hatreds’ which the international community ought to contain, rather than forestalling Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević’s pincer movement against the Sarajevo government and its citizens while they still could.
Hannan’s story about talking to the ‘High Commissioner’ (in fact ‘High Representative’) in Bosnia joins both men in an attitude of offhand detachment (the High Representative joking that if the Serbs and Muslims both thought he was biased against him, he must be doing something right; Hannan replying that if everyone was unhappy, he must have been doing something wrong). A similar indifference could be said to characterise the attitudes of both the Leave campaign and the government to the stakes of the Good Friday Agreement and the everyday realities of peace and (in)security at the Irish border. So detached a style of politics and peacebuilding has its origins in the entitlement with which colonial Great Powers took it upon themselves in past peace congresses to determine state borders and resolve competing national claims. Britain not only sat alongside continental European powers at these tables, but presumed to lead.
Where Britain’s prospects after Brexit might resemble post-Dayton Bosnia, above all without a deal, is in a much more everyday domain – the shock that travel restrictions, extended shortages of food and medicines, and permanent damage to standards of living might inflict on people’s sense of what used to be ‘normal’, and the sense of ‘stuckness’ that pervades Bosnian society two decades after Dayton, unable to weaken the entrenched ethnopolitical interests that hold the Dayton constitution in place and trapped in what Stef Jansen, Vanja Čelebičić and Čarna Brković have called the EU’s ‘waiting room’.
Yet an even more important, immediate parallel between Brexit Britain and post-Dayton Bosnia lies in the psychological blow struck to 3.7 million citizens of other EU countries living in the UK, forced to watch their sense of belonging in what had become their home country removed overnight and left in doubt over whether they would even be allowed to stay – amid the racist and xenophobic abuse that the Brexit referendum appeared to legitimise, persuading the perpetrators of a statistically significant rise in hate crime that it was now acceptable to tell speakers of foreign languages, people of colour, and Muslims to ‘go home’. The sense of licence and impunity that the Leave campaign and referendum victory released has troubling echoes of, even though its circumstances are not identical to, the atmosphere before the Yugoslav wars began.
Bosnia and the UK are not, and have never been, in the same structural position vis-à-vis the EU, and critiques of the EU’s ‘neo-colonial’ treatment of Bosnia and other countries on its internal and external periphery cannot simply be mapped on to the UK, a country that had the ability to influence EU policy in South-East Europe – and that won more concessions from the EU than any other member state. Instead, the true hinge of coloniality connecting Brexit Britain and post-Dayton Bosnia is the sense of imperial nostalgia and the myth of British exceptionalism which has always fuelled the imagination of the Leave campaign.
This post originally appeared at LSE Engenderings on 10 October 2018.
The faces are clean-shaven, the top hats are gone, and the photos are in colour, but the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 had one major thing in common with the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–20 besides its participants’ power to turn maps of ethnic majorities into internationally recognised borders: all the figures around both negotiating tables were men.
At the workshop on Integrating Gender into Historical Research that History PhD students at LSE invited me to join earlier this year, this was a dilemma for diplomatic historians approaching gender for the first time, especially those researching periods when diplomatic services were closed to women: what do you do when all the individuals in your sources are male?
There, of course, is precisely where you start.
First, as four decades’ worth of feminists researching international politics have learned from Cynthia Enloe, scholars can ask where the women were. Behind the scenes of those ceremonial photographs from Versailles, for instance, how did the conference depend on women’s work?
Gender analysis reveals the maids who maintained the diplomats’ palatial spaces, the laundresses starching those collars, the entertainers they watched at night and the sex workers some of those men on business in Paris would undoubtedly have hired – not to mention the women’s movements lobbying to be involved in peace-making, or the wives who affirmed married diplomats’ senses of self as men with the authority to decide which nation-states and empires should rule over which people’s lives. And while the Dayton agreement lacked women’s voices, it was largely through ex-Yugoslav women’s mediation as interpreters that its male signatories made themselves heard.
Gender analysis shows historians they can question what factors made women so absent in their sources or the institutions that generated them, and what other sources might show women’s participation in diplomacy, war and peace.
But studying gender is more than a matter of ‘add women and stir’: historically-situated ‘regimes’ of gender, entangled with other systems of social identity and power, are frameworks that all individuals negotiate as embodied selves, and ideological structures for the institutions where diplomacy and all other human activity takes place.
Using ‘masculinities’ as a tool of gender analysis opens up even all-male institutions – perhaps especially all-male institutions – to a ‘gender lens’. How did norms of ‘manly’ conduct and behaviour, and taken-for-granted notions of authority and leadership as masculine domains, influence how diplomatic men framed and approached the Paris or Dayton peace conferences, and how could we read that from the documents they left behind? How were their imaginations of how states themselves related to each other gendered? How did perceptions of different national and imperial masculinities influence how negotiators related to each other or made territorial deliberations, and what embodied performances of national masculinity did they make themselves?
Setting diplomatic masculinities in the full context of coloniality, nationalism, territory, violence and identity in the 20th century, of course, requires seeing how those masculinities were simultaneously racialised. To the ‘Council of Four’ and their aides at Versailles, it seemed natural to enshrine ‘national self-determination’ as a geopolitical principle in Europe while denying it in the Middle East, Africa and Asia; and the ideas about civilisation, morality, hygiene, bodily normalcy and cultural reproduction that made that double standard feel natural were imbued with interdependent colonial constructions of gender, sexuality and ‘race’.
Besides what gender analysis can reveal in historical evidence, the fact that historians’ own gendered experiences have already formed them as scholars means that gender is always already present in analysing the past.
Women, and trans people whether they are women or not, have had to be more conscious of gender than most cisgender men, socialised not to perceive the sexist and patriarchal structures that put their experiences at the centre of the story. Race and other systems of oppression interlock with gender and sexuality to shape what individuals perceive and fail to notice: as a queer white woman, during my own History degree at LSE, I asked myself many queer students’ question of ‘Where might there have been people like me in the past?’, which led me into feminist International Relations and its study of gender and war – but whiteness stopped me noticing race, which would not have been the case in the same country for a queer woman of colour the same age.
The very skills of critical thought needed for historical and social research, nevertheless, equip (or should equip) scholars to see beyond their own positionality: one can ask what Joan Scott, Susan Stryker or Angela Davis would have said about one’s evidence without having to have lived the life of Angela Davis, Susan Stryker or Joan Scott.
Part of the actuality of integrating gender into historical research stems from the questions scholars bring into their research agendas from the rest of their lives – all the more so when feminist thought is part of their life already. My own ideas, and even terminology, for understanding my own embodied history of gender non-conformity and non-normative desire have been vastly expanded because of the transformations in queer politics and queer expression that have taken place in my lifetime; I would not have started questioning south-east Europe’s position in the global politics of race if not for the digital feminism of the 2010s. Flavia Dzodan’s writing on the coloniality of securing the borders of ‘Europe’, for instance, first made me question whether south-east European nationalisms’ aspirational ideas of ‘Europe’ also contained identifications with coloniality and whiteness even though these nations had been imperial subjects, not imperial rulers, in the past. Postgraduates and more established researchers, reading popular works that expose the global and the intimate pervasiveness of structural racism, or the past and present complexity of gender variance, are all the more likely to be driven to address such questions in their own research.
But another dimension of the actuality of integrating gender into historical research stems from the actuality of the politics that surround us – what future scholars will call the historical context of how gender was being struggled over in our own time.
Already a target of right-wing press campaigns and organised online harassment, gender studies teaching and research in several countries is now under direct government attack. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, for instance, has made George Soros (the founder of Central European University in Budapest) the scapegoat for everything that Orbán’s populist ideology imagines to have dragged Hungarian national greatness down – including multiculturalism, solidarity with Muslim refugees, feminism, and queer and trans liberation.
All these are important research themes for CEU’s gender studies department, a world leader in researching the connections between postsocialism and postcoloniality. Early in 2016, I visited CEU to hold a workshop on race and whiteness in south-east Europe which had a decisive impact on writing Race and the Yugoslav Region later that year, and also gave a lecture on the politics of LGBTQ rights and ‘European’ belonging in the Eurovision Song Contest. A future historian researching the Orbán government’s confrontation with CEU might use both those events, among many other activities, as evidence of the postcolonial and queer gender scholarship it since has tried to repress.
Orbán’s government has tried to shut down CEU for more than a year, taken control of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences budget (just before a pro-Orbán magazine published a list of social scientists doing Academy-funded gender and sexuality research, exposing them to harassment and implying they did not deserve to be funded by the state), and this summer proposed to ban gender studies degrees in Hungary entirely. A Bulgarian research team, meanwhile, reported that the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and education ministry had blocked their project on gender equality in education from a UNESCO funding programme, while right-wing media accused them of trying to introduce a ‘third sex’ into schools.
These are national manifestations of the transnational ‘anti-gender’ movement. Gender scholars across central and eastern Europe are already familiar with being called Soros’ lackeys or mercenaries when they challenge patriarchal ideals of gender and family or criticise genocide denial. The same triangulation may now be confronting feminist, queer and postcolonial scholars doing the equivalent work in the UK of unsettling hegemonic and right-wing ideas of gender, nation and race. In February 2018, the Daily Telegraph ran a front page accusing Soros of bankrolling a secret plot to persuade British voters to reject Brexit, a frighteningly anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to be on the front page of even a conservative national newspaper, implying Soros was exerting a sinister influence over society to turn it away from what it should ‘naturally’ believe.
Among anti-trans campaigners organising on Mumsnet, a few have argued that Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which has published briefs on young people’s access to gender recognition, is responsible for forcing schools to teach about trans equality. The arguments of the UK Independence Party’s children and families spokesperson that educators teaching primary school children about trans people are ‘messing with young minds’ are in essence the same discourse that persuaded the Russian Duma to criminalise the promotion of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ to under-18s in 2013. The spaces through which people and organisations committed to anti-gender politics learn from each other across national borders are sometimes public and formal, as with the recent World Congress of Families held in Moldova (where organising against trans rights was a major theme). Often, though, they – and the movements they oppose – are part of a shifting online terrain that future historians will have to recover using whatever platforms and data will have survived deletion, obsolescence and surveillance, processes that might yet make the digital record even more fragmentary than paper archives of the past.
This international anti-feminist and anti-queer mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’ as a pillar of today’s racist populism makes gender scholarship all the more contentious – especially gender scholarship that reveals how gender and other systems of oppression have been intertwined. As scholars, writers, learners, or simply as embodied selves, we are the stuff of tomorrow’s gender history – and the findings and conclusions of our own research, about international history or any other kind, will be part of future historians’ evidence about how gender was contested in our own times.
Before anything else to do with the international politics of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest was overtaken by the likelihood that Eurovision 2019 will be held in Israel (with reverberations that will link the call for a cultural boycott of Israeli state-funded arts to the spectacle of Eurovision for the first time), the most unexpected – and unnecessary – collision between Eurovision and the history of colonialism came when some fans noticed during the first live rehearsals that the staging of the Dutch entry looked… at best, uncomfortable. And, at worst, downright racist.
Some of my most recent research is about stereotypes and fantasies of race, blackness and Africa in European popular music – the first chapter of my new book Race and the Yugoslav Region traces them through examples from Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav pop, and refers to the work of Gloria Wekker, a black feminist in the Netherlands who uses evidence from historical media alongside her own observations of racism in Dutch society to debunk myths of white Dutch ‘innocence’ about race.
When the Dutch song, Waylon’s ‘Outlaw in ‘Em’, unexpectedly qualified from the second semi-final on the Thursday night, I spent two hours writing a Twitter thread on why viewers had been finding the performance racist, to help explain why some of them had felt discomfort without necessarily knowing why, and so that users who wanted to call attention to how it looked on their own feeds didn’t have to make the argument from scratch.
(Parts, at least, of Eurovision’s many overlapping digital fandoms are no stranger to conversations about cultural appropriation on the Eurovision stage – including the Native American war bonnet worn by the Dutch representative Joan Franka in 2012, the East Asian visuals problematically surrounding this year’s winning song, and the dancing gorilla that joined Italian favourite Francesco Gabbani on stage in 2017, apparently as an allusion to ‘the naked ape’. Early reactions in the same circles to how the four black men around Waylon, a white Dutch country singer, had been asked to dance were suggesting its impression was a different order of unacceptable altogether.)
Dozens of people since then have tweeted me to explain why I was wrong.
It isn’t automatically racist to have one white guy and four black guys on stage. (It isn’t, which is why, say, Swedish boy-band Panetoz, who have one white band-member and four black, haven’t made fans who notice racial representation on stage feel uncomfortable like this. But then their four black guys aren’t always arranged around their one white guy.)
It’s demeaning to the dancers, who are showing off their talent. (Has anybody asked them? How freely do they feel they can speak about racism on Dutch TV, if they want producers to book them again?)
Waylon thinks it suits the song, and the dancers think so too.
The producers chose the most talented dancers. They didn’t think about race.
I’m insulting Waylon.
I don’t know what the intentions behind the act were, so I can’t comment. (I don’t know. I do know how it was looking to viewers who remarked on it, which kind of matters in a competition where 50% of the points come from an international public vote.)
I don’t even know Waylon. (This is true.)
Waylon is a very kind man to his fans. (That doesn’t prevent someone staging a racist show.)
They don’t get angry easily, but it makes them angry when they read this nonsense. (It made me angry to be staying up two extra hours before I ought to catch an early morning train because nobody on the Dutch production team realised this looked racist. It would have made me angrier if I’d been a black viewer getting the message that Eurovision didn’t care whether the party includes me or not.)
Waylon is half-Indonesian, so this isn’t a white guy with black dancers like I said. (I didn’t know anything about his family background when I wrote the thread, describing the impression Waylon’s placement on stage makes as a white man. But in a contest where family heritage is often part of the narratives that contestants give to try and connect with the public, that part of Waylon’s background hadn’t reached me (we heard much more about his love of country music and the US country singers like Johnny Cash who had inspired him). Most viewers who didn’t already know him well as a singer would also be perceiving him as a white man. And we can still say, via the history of images of race, that a performance where he seems to be in control over four black men identifies him with images of whiteness. Also, anti-black racism expressed by other people of colour is a thing.)
Waylon is half-Indonesian, therefore he can’t be racist. (The same; also, anti-black racism expressed by other people of colour is a thing.)
I’m taking the song out of context: it’s about standing up for yourself (‘When they knock you to the ground, you ain’t gonna let nobody keep you down’). (The viewer hasn’t heard that when they see a bare-chested black man seem to lash out at the camera, the very moment they hear ‘knock you to the ground’.)
I obviously didn’t listen to the lyrics. (Obviously.)
The dancers are krumping because young people on the krumping scene use those moves to transform violence into dance.
If you don’t like it, don’t vote for it. (I didn’t.)
It’s four handsome black guys, spicing up a dull performance. (Do you really want to bring up the racial politics of spice now? Because we can if you want.)
It’s a shame I’m bringing up their skin colour, not how well they can dance.
Americans and Europeans aren’t the ones enslaving male African refugees in Libya. (Somehow, this is meant to have something to do with Europeans designing a dance routine that calls to mind racist stereotypes of black men.)
Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet don’t come at Christmas like I said, they come on the 5th of December. (OK, I had said ‘every Christmas’ there are protests in the Netherlands over the blackface of Zwarte Piet. The date is the least important thing in that sentence, I’d suggest.)
Zwarte Piet gets his black face from coming down the chimney to deliver presents, not because he’s meant to represent black people. (Here we go.)
The people calling Waylon a racist are the ones seeing colour.
I’m seeing racist things where there aren’t any.
Waylon wanted the best krump dancers, and they happened to be black.
If Waylon was black and the dancers were white, would I still be saying he was a racist?
Waylon wanted to be multicultural.
I shouldn’t be commenting because the UK has only ever sent white acts. (Not true, though the last UK featured act at Eurovision with a black band-member was in 2011 and its last non-white soloist was 2009.)
Finding racism in every little thing is more racist than that.
It’s a shame that I’m a lecturer.
I ought to get therapy.
It’s a shame that I’m a lecturer and not responding to the people who have calmly taken their time to inform me of all of the above.
A lot of quote-tweets in Dutch, which might have made their authors feel better, but didn’t make whatever they wanted to call me have much effect on me because I can’t read them. (That doesn’t mean I ought to get a free pass to make comments about the cultures of countries where I don’t speak the languages. Far from it – I need to be even more sure that I’m right before I speak, not less. But I was rather grateful that I couldn’t read them.)
I was cheered by this picture of a talking gammon.
I was also cheered by the number of tweets I got from people who did find the performance uncomfortable and hadn’t been sure why, or who had enjoyed the song but changed their mind after reading more about the context.
Especially those second people, who were open to seeing something they liked from a more critical perspective even in something they love as much as Eurovision, where fans identify so much with their favourite songs! YOU ROCK. Loreen, or your Eurovision patron of choice, would be proud.
Things people on the internet have not said to me for explaining why the staging of the Dutch Eurovision entry look racist:
[Racial slur.]
Go back to your own country.
[Another racial slur.]
Any words the BBC wouldn’t be allowed to broadcast before 9 pm.
Catherine Baker 