The nation on Eurovision Stage
Belgium 2021 and the Performance of Belonging Jeremiah Harshman Eurovision is different to watch like it’s just a big music show, but it also works like a stage where countries present an image of themselves. Katrin Sieg argues that the Eurovision Song Contest is a public place where struggles over European identity and Europe’s boundaries play out through culture and performance (Sieg, 2012, pp. 245–246). Countries are not only competing with songs they are also showing what kind of Europe they belong to even though this isn’t supposed to be a political event. This idea is especially interesting for Belgium. In my earlier national identity blog, I argued that Belgium’s national identity is not built around one shared language or one unified cultural tradition. Instead, Belgium is better understood as a civic and institutional project, a multilingual federal state that holds together through compromise and systems designed to manage difference (Maddens et al., 2000; Izquierdo, 20...