Mapping Europe: Images of Europe in the Eurovision Song Contest

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) offers a unique viewpoint to the ways Europe has been imagined on television from the 1950s to the present. This paper looks at the use of a key visual symbol for Europe, the European map, to outline the history of the ESC’s representation of Europe. Whilst the European map was rarely used during the first decades of the ESC, it became a central visual element of the show in the 1990s, a period of great political change in Europe. Since then, the ESC maps have pictured an ever widening image of Europe, gradually moving towards a dynamic, moving image of Europe and finally, dispensing with a coherent map of Europe altogether.

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