‘Love Love Peace Peace’? The paradoxes of the Eurovision Song Contest

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was initiated as a means to create a collaborative climate among the (western) European countries after the Second World War. Still, the ESC is about competing among countries. Furthermore, it has been used to foster a national spirit and communicate about specific cultures and styles, and the bloc voting indicates a continuous alliancing rather than a shared European collaboration. This article discusses the paradoxes of ESC through elaborating on its love and hate, peace and war paradoxes. It makes an important account on the ESC as an initiative filled with paradoxes that may strongly challenge its initial intentions. The theorizing on paradoxes structures these and helps capture several dimensions of the ESC as interdependent and contradictory.