As the protests in Malmo over Israel’s inclusion in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, like the anguished defences of taking part by British and Irish contestants show, the kitschy spectacle is an inherently geopolitical format. In the interests of fairness then, should Palestine, like its neighbour Israel, enter Eurovision?

It is difficult to imagine a coherent argument against it on cultural grounds: after all, one of the arguments Israel’s supporters currently find most objectionable is that Israelis (most of whom are now descended from Middle Eastern Jewish refugees) “really” belong in Europe. In fact, the question is not technically a cultural one: as Palestine is not a member of the European Broadcasting Union, it is not eligible to join. Yet all the other Arab states neighbouring Europe are EBU members, and free to take part if they wish to: Morocco’s 1980 entry was — so far — the only Eurovision entry to be performed in Arabic, while Lebanon only withdrew its planned 2005 entry once the state broadcaster realised it would not be permitted to censor Israel’s performance. But that the question immediately asserts itself as a cultural one — a drawing of borders between our European home, and outsiders — reaches to the very heart of the contest’s meaning.

The Eurovision Song Contest, after all, was first performed in neutral Switzerland just 11 years after its contestants had finished ripping the continent apart in a war from which it has never recovered. Indeed, the first Eurovision took place a year before the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Community. Explicitly intended as a means to unite a shattered Europe in a continent-spanning shared cultural event, it is directly analogous to Nasser’s contemporaneous use of the new transistor radio and popular music to inculcate a shared sense of national identity across the Arab world. The Eurovision Song Contest, in its construction and reification of a shared European cultural space, is, like the growth of print media in the New World which underlay Benedict Anderson’s influential (and widely misunderstood) thesis on the origins of nationalism, a European “imagined community”. That it is tasteless kitsch is not an argument against this interpretation: all nationalism is kitsch to various degrees, more apparent to the external observer than to the dewy-eyed devotee.