The After-Life of Eurovision 2003: Turkish and European Social Imaginaries and Ephemeral Communicative Space

Save for Israel, no other nation participating in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) challenges popular notions of what it means to be “European” (geographically and/or culturally) to the extent than does Turkey. As the nation begins a long process toward membership of the European Union (EU), debates have flared (often in the print and broadcast media) over the “European-ness” of Turkey. It is interesting to note that, along with the third place achieved by the Turkish soccer team in the 2002 World Cup, the ESC victory in 2003 put the nation on the international “popular culture map” as never before. In this paper, the authors will analyze and discuss coverage in the international and Turkish press of Turkey's victory in the 2003 ESC and the extent to which a discursive space was opened in which the idea of Turkish “European-ness” (or “non-Europeanness”) was addressed and debated. Notes 1There exists a mix of news forms in major Turkish newspapers, such as the three used in this study, made up of conventional articles and pieces written by well-known columnists whose work tends to resemble the material published in the opinion pieces of newspapers in the United States or the UK. There is no pretense of objectivity in these column pieces, with columnists paid to give their political, economic, cultural and legal opinions. Because of the emotive nature of the victory, a significant portion of the overall material published in Turkish newspapers on the 2003 ESC was written by such writers, thus leading to a majority of the Turkish articles in this study being written by columnists. 2There is no gender in the use of Turkish pronouns, hence this translation. Schlesinger, P. (2003). The Babel of Europe? An essay on networks and communicative spaces. ARENA Working Paper 22/03. Oslo: University of Oslo.