It is tempting to dismiss the annual Eurovision Song Contest (broadcast on Saturday evening) as meaningless nonsense, and an exercise in which country can embarrass itself the most. However, I think this is far too hasty a judgement. Having watched it on and off for several years, I’d say it is still possible to make several key observations about Europe. Here are the most salient ones:

‘Europe’ is a very broad concept these days. Although Israel and Turkey have long been Eurovision contestants, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have only participated since 2006-08. Moreover, Russia, a contestant since 1994, hosted this year’s event. This means that we are now talking about a ‘Europe’ stretching all the way to Vladivostok, eleven time zones away.

English is overwhelmingly the dominant language of Europe. Although the hosts of the contest and the voting are conducted in English and in French, it is really an English-language event. I estimated from Saturday’s performances that only a third of songs were sang in their native languages, with the rest in English. Even native-language songs tended to fuse English lyrics in them.

‘Block’ voting is alive and well. One of the most striking features about the contest is the prevalence of block voting. By this, I mean that most countries’ audiences tend to vote for the songs of countries with which they have close ties. (Audiences are not allowed to vote for the entrants from their own countries.) As far as I can see, there are several distinct blocks:

• The former Yugoslavians

• The Baltic states

• Romania-Moldova

• The ex-Ottoman/pro-Turkey block (Turkey, Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia)

• The Northern European states (principally Scandinavia plus Iceland and Finland)

• The Ugro-Finnic nations (Hungary, Estonia, and Finland)

• Russia-Belarus-Ukraine

• Greece and its orthodox friends (Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Armenia)

• The Iberians

Based on the above, this typically leaves Europe’s traditional ‘Great Powers’ – Britain, France, Germany and Italy – somewhat isolated. This is also evident in that in the past 30 years, France and Germany have not won the contest, while Italy has won once, and the UK, twice.

Block voting is not necessarily political. Block voting is often accused of being political, but I think it is based more on culture. It is perfectly natural that countries with close linguistic and historical ties should have shared (bad) tastes in music. Although there are undoubtedly political undercurrents, if Eurovision was all about politics the ex-Yugoslavs would not support one another, nor would Ukraine support Russia.

The Eastern Europeans seem to take Eurovision much more seriously than the Western Europeans. This is evident in the extravaganza of the Moscow event, which almost seemed like the organisers were trying to outdo the Beijing Olympics. But why this competitiveness over something seemingly so naff? Presumably because there is a lingering post-communist desire for catch-up on the part of some Eastern Europeans, even after 20 years since the end of communism. For other eastern European countries such as Serbia, its victory in 2007 was surely part of its image cleansing after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Their message was ‘we are not just aggressive war-makers. There is a fun side to us too’.

And as for the more distant contestants, such as Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, their message is also clear: ‘We may be far away, and you may not be able to identify us on a map, but we are Europeans too’.