Transcripts
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CD1 Track 7 Ex 3.2
Listen to the introduction to the lecture Britain and the European Monetary Union. Which functions from the checklist in Task 2 does the lecturer use?
Britain and the European Monetary Union OK, good morning. Well, first up, can you all hear me? Good. Well that’s a good place to start. Well, today I’m going to be talking to you mainly about Britain and the so-called Eurozone, the European Monetary Union. As I am sure you know there are currently, although this may have changed by the time you listen to the recording of this lecture, 17 countries in the Eurozone; the last country to join being Estonia in 2011. You also know, as you are living in the UK and are using British currency (pounds and pence) on a daily basis, that Britain decided not to join the Eurozone, and given the problems the euro has had over the last few years, and is still having, many British people consider that to have been the right decision. Incidentally, the UK is not alone in this, as other EU countries also opted out, for example, Denmark. I’ll come back to the reasons the UK did not originally join later in this lecture.
Now I have already talked in previous lectures about the early history of the European Union, or the European Economic Community, as it was originally known. I also talked about the reasons Britain was reluctant to join the EEC, and why some other members of the EEC, France in particular, were not convinced that Britain should join either. One of the main reasons for this was, I suggested, that Britain felt it had a special arrangement with the United States and with its former colonies in the Commonwealth and didn’t want to endanger this relationship by joining. And after Britain’s participation in the wars with Iraq, you might conclude that the British still believe they have a special relationship with the US – even if the US may not see this in the same way.
However, leaving all that aside, today I want to talk about three things. Firstly, I am going to talk about the process of how the euro was introduced, and then I’m going to talk about the economic and political tests that a new country has to pass in order to join the euro – despite the problems in the Eurozone there are still countries that would like to join. However, as the title of my lecture suggests, I am going to spend most of the time today talking about why
Britain did not adopt the euro, and what that said, and still says, about Britain’s attitude in general to membership of the European Union.
CD1 Track 8 Ex 3.4
Listen to the introduction to the lecture Globalization. Which functions from the checklist in Task 2 does the lecturer use?
Globalization Globalization is a term that you hear everywhere these days, whether people are talking about food – McDonald’s and other fast-food companies in particular – or about the economy, with more and more multinational companies all over the world, or about information, with the Internet and the spread of the English language making the same information available at the same time to people all over the world. Arguably, globalization also includes national cultures, with some authorities suggesting, as I myself do in my latest book, that national cultures as we knew them no longer exist. In any case, globalization is often said to be the single most profound and wide-ranging change in human history. Ever. Well, that is something that you can discuss later – you may have your own opinions on whether this is true or not. But it does go without saying that it is something which affects everybody’s life; it affects people as diverse as farmers in the Third World, stockbrokers in London and New York, or global tycoons in multimillion-dollar empire industries. So, obviously, there is something in which a political scientist, or, for that matter, an historian, or a sociologist, or a geographer, or a whole range of other disciplines, might well be interested.
What I’m going to try to do today is give you some understanding of the history of globalization, what globalization means to people on a local level and what its implications could be for the whole world.
So I’m going to be talking on a global scale – which is appropriate for this topic – and I’m also going to be covering some fairly long periods of time.
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