Eurovision 2007 and the Politics of Victimization

About a week ago, the results of the final round of voting came in for Eurovision Song Contest 2007. The winner was surprising, both in that this year marked its debut (the contest has been held annually since 1956, to give you an idea of how old it is) and that it’s a relatively small country. The Eurovision 2007 first place went to Serbia and by no small margin (beating out second-place Ukraine by 268 points to 235). While I’m tempted to congratulate Serbia for their victory in the contest, perhaps because part of me sincerely believes it was because of their musical performance, I think their victory should also have us concerned.

As with most contests, controversy immediately erupted in the wake of the final results. Malta’s contingent claimed that the results in some countries weren’t based solely on the public vote, while also admitting that the 12 points Malta gave the United Kingdom were deliberately fixed in protest of bloc-voting. Because no country is allowed to vote for itself in Eurovision, accusations of bloc-voting have been a ubiquitous criticism levelled against the contest, especially in regard to Eastern European countries (most of whom have only recently entered the contest). Germany’s only winner was quoted as saying, “It is obvious that Eastern European countries engage in dirty trade with points every year. Germany should withdraw from the competition,”¹ and the voting problem was even brought up in the British Parliament, where a Liberal-Democratic MP claimed that the current voting system is “harmful to the relationship between the peoples of Europe.”²

On the whole though, these criticisms have been from a small minority, most of whom are usually dismissed by Western Europeans as being racist or discriminating. Regardless of whether or not that claim is valid, I think that the results of Eurovision 2007 reveal something important about the division between Western and Eastern Europe, which might as well be called “Bizarro Europe” from the viewpoint of most Americans and Western Europeans. An interesting article about this whole phenomenon—namely the rejection of Western Europe and the so-called “big powers” who fund the contest—appeared in the New York Times Op-Ed section recently. The Politics of Eurovision, written by Duncan J. Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia, does a decent job of fleshing out some of the interesting statistics that came out of Eurovision this year and what their implications are. Watts points out an interesting tidbit of data, but I think he draws the wrong conclusion from it:

But Serbia was the overwhelming beneficiary of the system, receiving the top score of 12 points from every other member of the former Yugoslavia — Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia — suggesting that memories of war and ethnic cleansing can be set aside with surprising ease when it comes to the serious business of winning a singing contest.³

For such a distinguished academic, this is a ridiculous and hopelessly naive conclusion as it seemingly ignores the fact that even if the other Balkan countries hadn’t have given Serbia the top score, Serbia still would’ve won in large part due to the votes given to them by the “big powers” of Western Europe and numerous Scandinavian countries. If anything, the Serbian victory in Eurovision 2007 seems to support the opposite claim: the memories of war and ethnic cleansing are still very much alive. Moreover, it is a highly distorted memory warped by the images defined by the popular media and NATO. It reflects a practically ubiquitous inculcation into the ideology of victimization. This is a particularly new 20th-21st century phenomenon associated largely with liberals, who make the claim that, for example, in the Serbian conflict, the war and ethnic cleansing wrested entirely upon Milosevic’s shoulders, rather than viewing him as a by-product of Serbian sociopolitical ethos. It also ignores the fact that Milosevic had a majority of support in Serbia, while simultaneously indulging Western Europe to act as caretaker to the hopeless, innocent, depoliticized victims, who want nothing but a return to normalcy.⁴

What makes the result of Eurovision 2007 even more disturbing is that this ideology of victimization is far from an isolated case relating to Serbia. It ostensibly reverberates across the entirety of Eastern and Southern Europe, reflected in this map of the Eurovision 2007 voting patterns. Could this be a widening of the ideology of victimization from those who suffered from “ethnic cleansing” to the countries who were once part of the Soviet bloc? Could it be a more general “guilt” regarding the economic disparity between East and West? If so, then I believe that this has dangerous implications. Militaristic humanitarian intervention (ignoring the obvious Orwellian oxymoron), regardless of whether or not it’s motivated by sincerity or as a pretense for guile, functions to subordinate the Other—the weaker, poorer, “backwards” countries—by making them the perpetual victim. Once their victimhood is revealed to be a guise, an illusion, they are immediately seen as drug-traffickers or radical fundamentalist sects, such as what happened to the Kosovo Liberation Army during the Kosovar war (in which NATO deliberately pulled funding from the KLA so as to ensure Kosovo’s status as victim).

It is difficult to assess what the alternatives are to the ideology of victimization, but to suggest that it’s solely between those who invariably support Serbia due to their inculcation into this ideologico-political belief and the people who claim that Serbia and Eastern Europe are engaging in an unfair bloc-voting scheme is a false choice. Slavoj Zizek points to a far more intriguing and complete analysis than one I could genuinely offer:

So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint (sic) the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?⁵

PS: Here is Serbia’s entry, in case you’re interesed in watching:

1. Malta slates Eurovision’s voting, BBC News, 14 May 2007 ↩
2. MP demands Eurovision vote change, BBC news, 15 May 2007 ↩
3. The Politics of Eurovision, Duncan J. Watts, 22 May 2007 ↩
4. Eurovision 2007 Scoresheet, Wikipedia ↩
5. Against The Double Blackmail, Slavoj Zizek, Lacan.com ↩