A short history of the borders of Eurovision

Never mind the music, here’s a map.

Image; EBU.

Between the music, and the politics, and the countries shamelessly voting for their neighbours, and the countries using their songs to make political statements about something appalling another country did to them at some point in the 20th century and thus triggering a diplomatic incident – using, let’s not forget, a dance routine – the Eurovision Song Contest can be a lot of fun. 

But it can also be pretty baffling, even if you ignore the bits involving people trying to dance to up-beat pop music under floodlights while dressed in heavy traditional costume or, in one case, as a giant hand.¹ That’s because, despite literally being called Eurovision, some of the countries involved are not obviously in Europe. There are the three countries of the Caucasus region: sure, two of these (George and Azerbaijan) have tiny patches of land on the European side of the mountains, but the third (Armenia) is definitively on the Asian side. Then there’s Israel, which has entered most years since 1973 and won, four times, despite very clearly being in the Middle East. Morocco entered in 1980; Lebanon and Tunisia both promised to, but then withdrew. Most bafflingly of all, since 2015, there’s Australia. 

That is at least four countries that have entered the Eurovision Song Contest, and another two that came close, despite not being in Europe. The reason this is allowed is that a country’s eligibility for participation in Eurovision has remarkably little with actually being in the geographical region known as Europe. 

Eurovision’s creation in the 1950s stemmed from the same impulse that gave rise to the European Coal & Steel Community: a belief that cross-border cooperation between the nations of Europe would be the best way to prevent another crippling continental war. Where the process that led to the Treaty of Rome, and ultimately the EU, would do it with politics, the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service broadcasters from across western Europe, would do through entertainment.

To that end, it established both Eurovision (its TV arm) and Euroradio (you can probably guess) to distribute live broadcasts to its members across the continent. Events featured in its early years included the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Narcissus Festival in Montreux, and a tour of the Vatican, complete with apostolic blessing from Pope Pius XII.

By 1955, though, the EBU was keen to find new initiatives, ideally with some of the tension and competitive edge you’d get from live-sport. (However the coronation went, there was no real doubt who would be crowned at the end of it.) So in January that year its newly formed “Programme Committee” met in Monte Carlo, and approved two plans. One was a contest of amateur entertainers, a sort of primordial “Europe’s Got Talent”, which was swiftly abandoned (the language barrier, one suspects, was a problem). The other, though, had more promise: Sergio Pugliese from the Italian broadcaster RAI proposed a song contest, an idea shamelessly lifted from the Italian-only one that had been held a few miles up the coast in Sanremo since 1951. 

The first Grand-Prix Eurovision de la Chanson Européenne was held in May 1956, in Lugano, Switzerland. Only seven countries entered (oddly enough, the six members of the ECSC, plus Switzerland); each, for the first and only time, offered two songs. And, after a broadcast lasting just 1 hour and 40 minutes, the host country won. 

The reason every future contest would restrict entrants to a single song is because the number of countries involved soon expanded. A lot. It had doubled by 1961, and hit 20 by 1978. By the 21st century, with the number of entries frequently beating 40 and nobody wanting to sit through six to eight hours of europop and international politics, Eurovision introduced semi-finals, which everyone except the “Big Five” contributors to the EBU budget have to get through before they’re allowed to take part in the final.

In all, 52 countries, of which 51 are still extant², have participated in Eurovision to date. The number of sovereign states in Europe has increased markedly since the 1990s, thanks to the dissolution of both the USSR and the former Yugoslavia, but all the same, there aren’t 51 countries in Europe. Even on the most expansive definitions, which include every accepted sovereign state that has occupied even the tiniest corner of the continent, you can only get to 50. 

The reason for the disparity, of course, is the assorted definitely non-European countries who’ve participated. And the reason for that is that the European Broadcasting Union has its own definition of Europe. A country can join the EBU, and thus participate in Eurovision, if it’s in the “European Broadcasting Area”, defined by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, as follows:

The “European Broadcasting Area” is bounded on the west by the western boundary of Region 1, on the east by the meridian 40° East of Greenwich and on the south by the parallel 30° North so as to include the northern part of Saudi Arabia and that part of those countries bordering the Mediterranean within these limits. In addition, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and those parts of the territories of Iraq, Jordan, Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey and Ukraine lying outside the above limits are included in the European Broadcasting Area.

Got that? Good.³

The EBA. Image: Vanjagenije/creative commons.

What that means in practice is the EBA is everything between the Atlantic, a line running slightly to the east of Moscow and Sochi, and another running slightly to the south of Cairo (roughly, as it happens, the boundary between Upper and Lower Egypt all those millennia ago). It was then extended a bit to make sure certain countries in eastern Europe and the Middle East are included in their entirety, and then, in 2007, extended further to include three (the Caucasus ones⁴) which fall outside that zone entirely. That means the EBA includes 60 globally recognised sovereign states: 49 to varying extents in Europe, and 11 (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) outside it.⁵ 

So could we one day see a 60 nation Eurovision? Well, probably not. A number of countries – Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq – are not in the EBU, even if they are theoretically eligible. Even those that are may not want to get involved. Morocco, after all, entered in 1980, with Samira Bensaïd’s Bitaqat Hub, both the only entry ever to come from a north African country and the only sung in Arabic. It placed second to last, and the Moroccan authorities were so upset they vowed never to return. 

Then there’s the issue of Israel. Tunisia intended to enter the contest in 1977, but withdrew at the last minute: the reason has never been specified, but it’s widely believed to be because the authorities didn’t want to compete with the Jewish state. The following year, the authorities in Jordan declined to show the Israeli entry, opting for some pictures of flowers instead; when it became clear that Israel was going to win, they cut the broadcast altogether, and awarded the win to second place Belgium. 

As late as 2005, Lebanon’s national broadcaster Télé Liban planned to repeat this trick, getting around laws against broadcasting Israeli content by simply cutting away during Israel’s entry and pretending it didn’t exist. This, Eurovision said, was not really on, and so it withdrew. After Israel won the 2018 contest, and thus the right to host the 2019 one, its minister of communications Julien Bahloul tweeted that he would personally invite a number of Middle Eastern countries to compete next year. But since some of those cited fell well outside the European Broadcasting Area and were definitely not eligible, it’s at least possible this was a stunt, and nothing more was heard of it. 

These days, if anything, the contest is getting smaller. In 2021, Belarus was expelled from the EBU over concerns about media freedom; Russia followed the following year, because of the invasion of Ukraine. Such commitment to basic liberal values, incidentally, makes it seem extremely unlikely that Kazakhstan – which has a corner in Europe, if not in the EBA – will ever be invited to join. It must also raise questions about whether, say, Saudi Arabia would be allowed into Eurovision, even if for some reason it expressed an interest.

It’s worth noting too that there are even some countries in Europe that have never participated. Liechtenstein has never entered: the one time it considered it, back in the 1970s, it was preemptively disqualified on the grounds that it is not a member of the EBU. Neither has the Vatican, which is, with that talent for costuming, a shame. So the dream of a 60 country Eurovision – possibly one where the semi-finals go on for weeks – seems likely to remain just that. 

That said, Australia – which is very clearly neither north of Cairo nor west of Moscow – only gets to take part because the contest has a lot of fans down there and so, in 2015, the organisers asked if they fancied participating. Who knows how the organisers of Eurovision will be defining the borders of Europe in decades to come?

Self-promotion corner

The above is an extract from a thing that has yet to see the light of day. Watch this space to learn more. 

In the meantime, it would be remiss of me not to note three things:

1.  Next Wednesday, 17th May, the other half of my shadowy cabal Tom Phillips and I are doing a turn at Nerd Nite London on the history of conspiracy theories, as outlined in our book (now available in paperback!) Conspiracy: A History of B*llocks Theories, and How Not To Fall For Them. Why not come to the Backyard Comedy Club, Bethnal Green, to watch? You can buy tickets here. I’ll probably say hi, if you seem nice.

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1. Germany’s 2021 entry, I Don’t Feel Hate by singer Jendrik Sigwart. The hand costume was meant to be a middle finger, as mentioned in the song’s lyrics. Eurovision rules prevented such an outrageous thing from being worn on stage, but were apparently happy with a costume showing two fingers raised aloft, as in a peace sign – even when the dancer, one Sophia Euskirchen, could revert it to a middle finger simply by lowering an arm.

2. Yugoslavia: the Soviet world didn’t join the contest until the dissolution of the USSR.

3. Actually, it’s even worse. How is the western boundary of Region 1 defined? By “Line B”: “a line running from the North Pole along meridian 10° West of Greenwich to its intersection with parallel 72° North; thence by great circle arc to the intersection of meridian 50° West and parallel 40° North; thence by great circle arc to the intersection of meridian 20° West and parallel 10° South; thence along meridian 20° West to the South Pole”. Another way of putting that might be “the Atlantic Ocean”, but if we’ve learned anything from this book it’s surely that that’s precisely the sort of vagueness that gets you in trouble.

4. Although the westernmost point of Georgia is within 500m of the meridian.

5. You’re wondering why there are 50 states with territory in Europe but only 49 of them in the EBA, aren’t you? Knew you were. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that soon enough.