Eurovision 2024, Malmö. The annual identity conversation.

Eurovision is, officially, a song contest. It is, practically, a collective performance of European identity — which means it is also a performance of European tensions, alliances, grudges, and aspirations, carried in the medium of varying quality pop music and theatrical staging.

I want to talk about what Eurovision does for children who watch it, because I think it is more substantial than it appears.

The most immediately legible thing Eurovision does is show children that Europe is large, varied, and internally competitive. The countries that appear on the scoreboard — forty-plus, some of them not geographically European in any strict sense — are not names in a textbook. They are teams, with delegations, with fans in the audience, with people who cared about this enough to send someone to Sweden to sing.

This makes the countries real in a way that textbook geography doesn't. When a child watches the Finnish entry and then the Azerbaijani entry and then the Portuguese entry and sees the diversity of what is called 'Europe' — this is geography being encountered rather than memorised.

Children who watch Eurovision encounter geography as a lived experience rather than a memorised fact. Countries are not names on a map. They are flags with songs and audiences with preferences.

Children who watch Eurovision encounter geography as a lived experience rather than a memorised fact. Countries are not names on a map. They are flags with songs and audiences with preferences.