BBC Radio 4 2016-05-16

BBC Radio 4 2016-05-16

Good morning

Perhaps this weekend you’ve been enjoying the annual Eurovision bubble – or perhaps you’ve been avoiding it – either way, you’ll have done well to evade it completely, given the ever more complex build up, and the political overtones of Ukraine’s victory on Saturday night, with a song about the deportation of Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944.

In one way – at least for the British – Eurovision is a bubble – an annual opportunity to indulge in the light-hearted mockery of our more serious- minded neighbours and to be nostalgic for the days of Sandie Shaw when the competition was simpler and we had any hope of winning it.

Like any cultural event, however, Eurovision is interesting to students of anthropology for on such ritualized occasions we can see the patterns of our political, social and economic life reflected as in a mirror - or rather refracted as in a prism - in such a way that the issues come into different focus: the style of the songs and the interplay between local and more global genres; the conflicts about the nature of European values: our religious inheritances, our attitudes to gender and sexuality. Even the question of which nations can complete is revealing - can Australia really be a permanent part of the competition on the grounds of its cultural affinity to Europe? And whose idea of Europe, at that?

In a book called, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, Chicago University Professor of Music and the Humanities, Philip Bohlman, makes the argument that the role of song in the building of Europe is nothing new. In tracing the history however, he makes a distinction between the contribution of music to national identity and to nationalism. The first being a gift we are glad to share with others; the second being an aggressive strategy to defend our own identity at the expense of the identities of others.

Religion at its worst reinforces such tribal behaviour, but at its best it helps human beings to stay attached to the humanity and dignity of those who are not like us. As Rowan Williams has commented at the start of this Christian Aid week – ‘Volunteers from 20,000 churches will be witnessing to their neighbours that neighbours exist on the other side of the world as well.’

This human ability to identify with the plight of another human community removed from our own is perhaps part of the story of what happened in the popular voting on Saturday night as people were touched by Jamala’s song. In the run up to the EU Referendum as feelings run high, it would be good – whatever we think is the best platform from which Britain should operate in the wider world - if we could stay attached to the humanity of those on the other side of the debate – as well as the humanity of those on the other side of Europe and beyond.