Australia joining the Eurovision shows the awesome soft power of the song contest

All you want from Europe is free trade, cheap flights and the Eurovision Song Contest – the rest is bureaucracy. One of the contest’s many strengths is its generous, expansive definition of ‘European’. Its soft power is awesome, and effective. It reaches out to countries banging on the door of the West – nations the European Union itself is too sniffy, paranoid and insular to include.