The thesis sheds light on how the Eurovision Song Contest can represent a tool for displaying a national image where soft cultural-political conflicts are formed through the context of cultural diplomacy. The aim of the task is to use the method of multimodal analysis in combination with an expert interview with Eurovision expert Andrej Hofer to pay attention to verbal and non-verbal communication where individual audiovisual indicators are used to shape socio-political relations. Furthermore, I answer two research questions through which I ask myself how the competition functions as an arena of media spectacle that is used to shape the image of countries, and continue with the question of how the Eurovision stage is used as a platform where socio-political content is displayed through the media spectacle. Moreover, a case study of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia in the years between 2014 and 2024 illustrates the intertwining of music and politics where, with the help of semiotics and multimodality, we see the deeper meaning of the competition in the context of international politics and society. Clashes on the Eurovision stage are replacing real battles on the ground and shed light on the conflict in the context of media spectacle. Therefore, social and cultural battles continue to play an important role in the construction of the image of modern Europe.
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