Introduction: Eurovision and the ‘New’ Europe

The year 2012 was a tumultuous one for Europe. The sovereign debt crisis, considered by many to be the biggest challenge ‘to hit Europe since World War II’ (Smith, 2012a), deepened, with protests against austerity measures spreading from Greece to Portugal to Spain, as the latter vacillated about whether or not to request a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the face of crippling national debt. Eurozone countries, led by Germany, approached a showdown with the IMF about the increasingly apparent failure of austerity measures to save the Greek economy. The arrest and detention of members of the feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot in Moscow, after having staged a performance critiquing the Orthodox Church’s support of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in a recent election, drew global attention to the oppressiveness of Russian society under Putin’s leadership. Russia and Turkey became variously implicated in the bloody conflict in Syria even as the United Nations and European Union (EU) prevaricated about taking action in the region (see The Economist , 2012c; Tisdall, 2012). The resource-rich republic of Georgia saw its first power shift via election (as opposed to revolution) since its independence in 1991, though experts predicted that billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream coalition would be challenged to see through a peaceful transition from the authoritarian government of Mikael Saakashvili (see The Economist , 2012b; Harding, 2012). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.