On May 16, the Eurovision Song Contest celebrates its 70th anniversarye anniversary in Vienna (Austria) in front of tens of millions of viewers (166 million in 2025). Officially apolitical, explicitly popular and primarily entertainment, this event is the largest live music television program in the world. It is the subject of multiple geopolitical strategies, sometimes uninhibited and aggressive. The fight for control of media space then completes the battle for geographic supremacy.
Throughout its history, Eurovision has reflected people’s aspirations for peace, states’ ambitions for supremacy and their appetite for prosperity. Let us retrace its social, economic and geopolitical history. These are all milestones in the collective history of Europeans. Eurovision is the soundtrack to the great “film” of the post-war continent.
Like the European Coal and Steel Community (Ceca, 1951) and the European Economic Community (EEC, 1957), Eurovision was born from the rejection of the horrors of the Second World War. The competition was created in 1956 by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a professional association under Swiss law founded in 1950 which brings together audiovisual groups from Western Europe to form a broadcasting area accessible to its members.
1974, a commercial turning point
The objective of the audiovisual groups of the EBU and the father of the competition, Marcel Bezençon, is to bring together European television viewers – including German and Italian – around a common festive television and radio program, despite the language barriers and the scars of war, which only took…
