Wandering Borders

UNIT 1

ЧИТАЕМ АНГЛИЙСКУЮ И АМЕРИКАНСКУЮ ПРЕССУ

МОСКВА

«Уникум-Центр»

Утверждено

РИС Ученого Совета

Российского университета дружбы народов

Рецензент: к.ф.н., доцент Озюменко В.И.

Есакова Е.В. Читаем английскую и американскую прессу.

Учебное пособие по английскому языку для студентов старших курсов гуманитарных специальностей. – М.: «Уникум-Центр», 2001. – с. 81.

Учебное пособие по материалам английской и американской прессы подготовлено на кафедре иностранных языков факультета гуманитарных и социальных наук РУДН.

Ответственный редактор: к.п.н., доц. Талалова Л.Н.

CONTENT

Unit 1. Wandering Borders (Part 1)...............................................………………..4

Unit 2. Wandering Borders (Part 2)...............................................………………..9

Unit 3. King of the Dupers...........................................................…………………13

Unit 4. Open Doors........................................................................………………..16

Unit 5. The Feminist Who Fights For the Boys................................……………..20

Unit 6. I’m Bored of Pedantic Grammarians..................................……………….25

Unit 7. Down and Out at Oxbridge...............................................………………...29

Unit 8. Europe: Still in Search of Definition...................................………………34

Unit 9. Friends in Deed...................................................................……………….39

Unit 10. Spirit Level (Part 1)...........................................................………………43

Unit 11. Spirit Level (Part 2)...........................................................………………47

Unit 12. Crisis Down on the Farm (Part 1)......................................………………51

Unit 13. Crisis Down on the Farm (Part 2).....................................……………….56

Unit 14. Juvenile Leads....................................................................………………61

Unit 15. «Tax Havens» Plan to Rebuild Cities..................................……………..65

Unit 16. Schools, Children and Drugs..............................................……………...69

Unit 17. The Great Leap Backward (Part 1).......................................…………….74

Unit 18. The Great Leap Backward (Part 2).......................................…………….79

WANDERING BORDERS

(Part 1)

Despite its antiquity, Europe remains extraordinarily diverse. And the persistent diversity of ancient communities must necessarily be a barrier to unification. At the present Europe contains 46 sovereign states, the majority of which are democratic republics. But there are also constitutional monarchies, self-governing dependencies and at least one formal autocracy. Parts of Europe are very wealthy: citizens of the Swiss Confederation or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg enjoy an average GDP of nearly $40,000 per capita. Other parts are very backward: ox-plows were still in use until recently in districts of the Massif Central in France and the Balkans. Linguistically, Europe still speaks in scores of mutually unintelligible tongues. On the religious front, the various Christian denominations have always coexisted with minority religions. Thanks to recent immigration, many of Europe's largest cities, like Paris and London, are as racially mixed as New York or Los Angeles.

Historical experiences follow no common pattern. Southern and much of Western Europe participated in classical civilization, whereas Northern Europe did not. The southwest, in Iberia, lived for several centuries under Moorish Muslim domination, while the southeast, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, was for half a millennium in the Ottoman sphere. In modern times, many western nations, from Portugal to Germany, became world-wide imperial powers. But many central and eastern nations, in contrast, were subjugated by the Russian or Austrian Empires. In the 20th century, Western Europe spawned fascism and Eastern Europe saw the rise and fall of communism. A huge swathe of Europe stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from eastern Germany to western Russia, has only just emerged from a double dose of totalitarian oppression.

Many modern Europeans look back to the Roman Empire as a Golden Age when Europe was prosperous, civilized and united. The Empire of Charlemagne, founded 800 A.D., and the subsequent Holy Roman Empire, from 962 to 1806, were attempts to over that supposed lost unity. Yet such nostalgia is misleading. The Roman Empire never united the peoples of Europe. It soon outgrew its initial base in Italy, and thence spread first to North Africa and later around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. It never occupied Europe beyond the Danube, nor even the whole of the British Isles. Its centre of gravity lay far to the east – so much so that in 330 A.D. the Emperor Constantine decided to move his capital from Rome to the Bosphorus. Its most populous province was in Egypt. Its state religion, formally adopted in 398 A.D., came from Judaea in the Orient. After the collapse of the western provinces in the 5th century, the rest of the Empire lived on in the East for a thousand years. Westerners call that late Empire Byzantine; the Byzantines called themselves Romans.

It is easy to imagine that the Christian Church did a better job in unifying Europe than the Romans did. After all, the civilization that took root in the middle of the first millennium declared itself to be "Christendom". Unfortunately, no single, unified Christian Church in the institutional sense ever came into being. The Greek Church and the Latin Church competed in the early centuries when five equal patriarchs exercised jurisdiction. After four of the five passed under Muslim rule, the Latin patriarch in Rome was left as the sole, seemingly independent voice. Only then could the Roman Pope claim universal supremacy. Yet the jurisdiction, theology and practices of Rome were steadfastly opposed by Orthodox Christians. From 1054, that ancient rivalry solidified into a permanent schism. Later, both the Catholic and the Orthodox worlds fractured, producing the fourfold split of Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Uniates which prevails to this day. Christianity, in any case, never gained a monopoly of belief. It is impossible to describe the history of European spirituality without presenting the important and continuous pagan, Jewish and Muslim strands.

It is a matter for debate whether Ottoman expansion should be counted as an attempt to unify Europe. Western historians rarely do so. After all, the Ottomans were Muslims, and their advances were limited to the neglected eastern half of the Continent. Yet the percentage of European territory that they overran, from the Caucasus to Austria, was enormous. The Christian princes of Europe seriously feared a rout in the 16th and 17th centuries when the Sultan's armies twice besieged Vienna. Before becoming ''the Sick Man of Europe'', the Ottomans were the major force to be reckoned with. Like the Russian Empire, which in many parts supplanted them, they lived on depredation. If the King of Poland, John Sobieski, had not triumphed before Vienna in 1683 at the head of his winged hussars, the consequences of a Christian defeat are hard to exaggerate. Edward Gibbon once speculated famously about the might-have-beens if the Muslims had not been stopped by Charles Martel a thousand years earlier on the Loire. The Christian victory of 1683 on the Danube merits the same sort of reflection. "Perhaps", Gibbon wrote, "... the pulpits [of Oxford] might today demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and the truth of the revelation of Mohammed."

Napoleon's conquests were not a might-have-been. In the two decades that separated his first advance into the Netherlands in 1794 from the retreat from Moscow in 1812, the French emperor marched triumphantly from one end of Europe to the other. Contrary to Western impressions, however, Napoleon was still a long way from overrunning the whole of Europe. He could not take the British Isles; he missed out on Scandinavia, even though one of his ex-marshals became King of Sweden; he never entered the Habsburgs' hereditary lands nor the vast Balkan possessions of the Ottomans; and he only spent six disastrous months on the western fringes of Russia. Even so, at its height, his continental system stretched from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the upper reaches of the Volga. What is more, his armies tramped in the tracks of Le Enlightenment, spreading vulgar versions of the secular ideology that had been taking root, under French leadership, since the demise of Christendom. When Czar Alexander I met Napoleon at Tilsit, and was treated to a string of comments on Europe, he stopped to ask what Europe was. Then he answered himself: "L'Europe, c'est nouns".

(to be continued)

I. Find English equivalents for the following:

- по современным подсчетам;

- зависимая страна;

- самодержавие;

- на душу населения;

- угнетение;

- страны Востока;

- христианский мир;

- пользоваться привилегиями;

- проповедники;

- мирской.

II. Answer the questions:

1. What historical experiences did different parts of Europe follow?

2. What do modern Europeans think about the Roman Empire?

3. Has the Christian Church managed to unify Europe?

4. What is the role of the Ottoman expansion in unifying Europe?

5. What might have been if the Muslims had not been stopped by Charles Martel?

6. Could Napoleon conquer the whole Europe?

7. What did Napoleoh’s armies bring to Europe?

III. Say what is true and what is false. Correct the false sentences:

1. The persistent diversity of ancient communities might not be a barrier to unification.

2. In modern times many western nations from Portugal to Germany were fractured into scores of small countries.

3. The civilization that took root in the middle of the first millennium declared itself to be «Christendom».

4. The jurisdiction, theology and practices of Rome were steadfastly backed by Orthodox Christians.

5. «Perhaps», Gibbon wrote, «...the pulpits [of Oxford] might today demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.».

6. In the two decades that separated Napoleon’s first advance into the Netherlands in 1794 from the retreat from Moscow in 1812, the French emperor marched triumphantly from one end of Europe to the other.

7. Napoleon’s armies tramped in the tracks of the Enlightenment, spreading vulgar version of a new denomination that had been taking root under French leadership, since demise of Christendom.

IY. Find а word or phrase in the text which is similar in meaning to the following:

- something that continues to exist, even after you have tried to make it disappear;

- a range of difference of condition, quality or type;

- a country or society which does not have a lot of modern industries and machines;

- an active competition between people, businesses or organizations;

- a complete defeat;

- to surround a town or other place in an attempt to capture it;

- the act of making known something which is true, but which was previously secret or unknown.

Y. Express the meaning of the following words and phrases:

- antiquity;

- backward;

- collapse;

- to come into being;

- a long way from;

- migh-have-been;

- denomination.

YI. Demonstrate the meaning of the following words and expressions in sentences of your own:

- diversity;

- autocracy;

- oppression;

- to come into being;

- supremacy;

- rivalry;

- schism;

- rout;

- depredation

- hereditary.

YII. Topic for discussion:

1. United Europe - reality or dream?

UNIT 2

(Part 2)

Hitler's attempt to unify Europe assumed similar proportions to Napoieon's, but collapsed even more quickly. He took much of Scandinavia; overran most of the Balkans, and having occupied Ukraine, was heading for the oil of the Caucasus when stopped in his tracks at Stalingrad. "Europe is a racial entity", Hitler once said, "not a geographical one." One of the Nazis' house journals was called Nation Europa. This ugly vision was his undoing. It inspired some of the Nazis' most fatal mistakes. It underlay the complacent decision in 1940 to call off the attack on a vulnerable Britain, which later became the base for projecting America's decisive power into Europe. By Hitler's lights, Britain was a fellow Germanic power with no fundamental reasons for opposing him. Racial considerations, and the contemptuous view of Slavs as Untermenschen, also underlay the decision to shun all compromise with the peoples of the Soviet Union. Hitler risked outright conquest or nothing, and he came within a hair's breadth of winning the gamble. If only he had done what the user's generals had done, and backed the fervent desire for freedom of 40 million Ukrainians, it is hard to see how the Soviet Union could possibly have survived. Instead, he provoked heroic resistance. The Red Army inflicted 75% of Nazi Germany's total casualties.

Not that the Soviet leaders were free of grandiose schemes of their own. The Bolsheviks took their ideas from Lenin's spin on Marx's analysis of European history. After winning the Civil War in Russia, they tried to put it into practice. In 1920, they dispatched nearly a million men on the road to Berlin and to "world-wide conflagration". The campaign, which is now known as the Russia-Polish (wrongly) or Polish-Soviet War, was really the initial stage in an attempt to unify the whole of Europe under the communist banner by force. Lenin made no secret of his hopes. He only came unstuck because the Poles, whose country lay astride the road from Moscow to Berlin, had no intention of assisting him. At the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, Stalin, who was serving as a commissar on the Polish front and was blamed by Trotsky for the defeat, never forgot it. Twenty years later, there can be little doubt that, the opposition of the Western Allies, he would have used his victory over the Nazis to return to Lenin’s old agenda.

Unlike its predecessors, the European Movement that came into being after World War II was based on democratic principals and peaceful methods. Its guidingemotions were revulsion at Europe’s wars and shame before the unparalleled bloodletting. Its founding Congress at the Hague in May 1948 was filled with lofty rhetoric. Winston Churchill talked of «men and women of every country thinking of being European as of belonging to their native land».

Yet for more than 40 years, the European Movement labored under three massive constraints. Firstly, except for certain initiatives by the Council of Europe, it was banned from functioning in the eastern halt of the Continent, the Soviet bloc. Secondly, it had to take second place in the political counsels of Western Europe to the Anglo-American alliance. Thirdly, through the dominant role of NATO in political and security matters, it had to abandon the «three pillars» of the original Schuman Plan and confine itself to the economic sphere. The U.S. looked favorably on the series of economic organizations launched with the European Coal and Steel Community (1952) and the Common Market (or E.E.C., 1958) as natural extensions of the Marshall Plan. But there was no question of promoting the rise of a rival power bloc. As a result, European leaders were obliged to advance by piecemeal steps or, as their critics would have it, by stealth. Their basic strategy as conceived by Jean Monnet was dubbed fonctionalisme, the accumulation of centralized European institutions that would gradually annex the functions of national governments. It was described as a giant salami machine. The assumption was that the balance would eventually tip, and governments would surrender the stumps of their sovereignty when a sufficient pile of slices had fallen into the European basket.

From the historical point of view, the present troubles of the European Union derived from an unforeseen accident. The Soviet bloc collapsed in the East before Monnet’s agenda was complete in the West. One side of the tent was blown away before the circus took final form. The performers have been left simultaneously designing a new ring and new acts with new players. And different people and different priorities. The senior Franco-German troupe is pressing ahead with monetary union-the last stage in the old economic plan. At the same time they still hope to enlarge the Union eastwards and to introduce the major structural reforms required by enlargement. There is no ringmaster, no efficient executive authority and no real democratic accountability. The most urgent decisions will be left, as always, to horse trading. If earlier attempts at European unity were wrecked by an excess of political will, present prospects are marred by the manifest lack of political direction.

(Norman Davis, Time)

I. Find English equivalents for the following:

- отменять;

- решительный;

- страстное желание;

- презрительный;

- предшественник;

- отвращение;

- быть связанным обязательствами;

- одновременно;

- ответственность.

II. Answer the questions:

1. What was Hitler’s notion of Europe?

2. Why did Hitler fail to conquer Europe?

3. How did the Bolsheviks try to put their ideas about ‘’world-wide conflagration’’ into practice?

4. What was the European Movement based on?

5. What constraints did the European Movement labor under?

6. Which strategy did the European countries adopt?

7. What are the present troubles of the European Union derived from?

III. Say what is true and what is false. Correct the false sentences:

1. Hitler’s attempt to unify Europe assumed similar proportions to Napoleon’s but collapsed even more quickly.

2. He took much of Scandinavia; overran most of the Balkans and having occupied Ukraine, was heading for the iron of the Urals when stopped in his tracks at Stalingrad.

3. Hitler risked outright conquest or nothing, and he came within a hair’s breadth of winning the gamble.

4. The Red Army inflicted 50% of Nazi Germany’s total casualties.

5. Stalin, who was serving as a commissar on the Polish front was blamed by Trotsky for the defeat, nevertheless forgot it.

6. From the historical point of view, the former troubles of the European Union derive from some predictable accidents.

7. There is no ringmaster, no efficient executive authority and no real democratic accountability.

IY. Find a word or phrase in the text which is similar in meaning to the following:

- a complete, separate thing, that is not divided and that is not a part of anything else;

- to be very pleased with oneself;

- to make you want to do something by giving you somebody new ideas to carry it out;

- to express strong disagreement or disapproval of something or somebody;

- an act of winning;

- to be involved with only that thing and nothing else;

- the action of process of making something bigger.

Y. Express the meaning of the following words and phrases:

- decisive;

- to oppose;

- casualty;

- to put into practice;

- pillar;

- by stealth;

- priority.

YII. Demonstrate the meaning of the following words in sentences of your own:

- undoing;

- to underline;

- decisive;

- to shun;

- to come unstuck;

- revulsion;

- constraint;

- pillar;

- accountability;

- excess.

YII. Topics for discussion:

1. Advantages and disadvantages of the European Union.

2. Would you like Russia to be a part of the United Europe? Why?

UNIT 3

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