Creating Europe through culture? The impact of the European Song Contest on European identity
- PDF / 751,790 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 46 Downloads / 237 Views
Creating Europe through culture? The impact of the European Song Contest on European identity Tom Coupe1 · Natalia Chaban1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The UK’s Brexit vote marked a major institutional crisis for the EU and re-opened both the scholarly and the popular debate about the importance and drivers of a “European identity”. We use quasi-experimental data to estimate the immediate impact of the biggest pan-European cultural event, the Eurovision Song Contest, on whether people in Europe consider themselves to be Europeans. Using data from several Eurobarometer surveys with tens of thousands of observations, we find little evidence that the contest at current provides a sizeable immediate boost to the share of Europeans who feel European, feel EU citizens, or have a positive image of the EU. Keywords European identity · Eurovision · Quasi-experiment · Culture JEL Classification N44 · P16 · Z1
1 Introduction The development of a European identity, Europeans’ sense that they belong to Europe, is regarded by many observers as crucial for the future of the European Union (EU). Alesina et al. (2017) summarize their research on whether Europe is an optimal political area as follows: “…the important issue for the future of European integration is not so much that Europeans are still too different from each other in terms of culture, policy preferences, or national interests. The important question is the evolution of national versus European identities.” Similarly, Mendez and Bachtler (2016) argue that “The European Union (EU) requires citizens’ support and identification to enhance its legitimacy”. Research indeed has shown that Europeans who identify as Europeans are more likely to see the European Union (EU) as good for their country and are more likely to support key EU policies like freedom * Tom Coupe [email protected] 1
University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Empirica
of movement and fiscal redistribution within Europe (see for example, Carey 2002; Costa-Font and Cowell 2015; Vasilopoulou and Talving 2019). Various factors that might influence the evolution of people’s national identities have been explored in a vast body of academic literature. For example, Aspachs-Bracons et al. (2008) analyse the impact of language policy on national identity, while Clots-Figueras and Masella (2013) provide evidence of the link between education and national identity. Also the formation of specifically the European identity remains a much researched—as well as much debated—subject [for a recent overview of this field see Mendez and Bachtler (2016)]. This paper contributes to the latter group of studies. In this paper, we focus on one potential contributor to European identity, the most popular Europe-wide music festival, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). This song contest has a clear European profile, with artists representing most European countries, and with spectators from all over Europe de
Data Loading...
