Europe's Future
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do German citizens feel about the future of the world’s largest trading bloc? Ed Butler visits PSM Protech, a specialist engineering firm in Bavaria where he speaks to its owner Irene Wagner about what the EU means to her company plus he asks Volker Wieland, an economics professor at a Frankfurt University and one of Germany’s five key economic advisors, the so-called Wise Men, what the threats to the EU are.
(Picture: Irene Wagner in the PSM Protech factory. Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily here on the BBC World Service. My name is Ed Butler and today I'm in Germany, the European Union's economic powerhouse, looking at how the citizens here feel about the world's largest trading bloc. |
| 0:19.7 | We are living in a very, very good time at the moment. |
| 0:23.2 | Germany is more or less quite healthy. And I think we have gained much more than we had to pay. |
| 0:30.6 | I like the concept that you can travel. Like, it's very easy to travel to Italy. It's very easy to travel to France. |
| 0:36.4 | Having a joint currency with so many |
| 0:38.6 | different member states is new and we have to have the right institutions to basically have |
| 0:44.3 | responsibility and control on one level. The European Union, keeping it together and what's |
| 0:50.3 | pulling it apart. That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:57.5 | That's right. |
| 1:01.9 | This week, across Business Daily, we're trailing around Europe, |
| 1:05.0 | trying to do something that journalists, well, we often talk about, |
| 1:07.4 | but we don't always address fully head-on, |
| 1:11.6 | and that's getting a sense of what the mood is really like here. The European Union, 28 nations, free trade, general freedom of movement, |
| 1:15.6 | a great experiment whose origins go back to the 1950s, but it's one which now, well, it could be under a bit of a strain. |
| 1:22.6 | Today you find me in Berlin, I'm in a cafe in the capital of Germany, the EU's biggest economy, |
| 1:28.5 | looking up at the Reichstag building the German parliament redeveloped back in the 1990s, |
| 1:33.7 | a symbol of German reunification after the Cold War and a sense of optimism that has persisted |
| 1:40.0 | here within the European Union. We're going to hear a bit about that from some German citizens |
| 1:45.0 | in a moment. But first, let's look at what's happened over the weekend. The EU has signed off |
| 1:49.8 | on the much-touted withdrawal agreement for Brexit, giving its approval to a draft plan that would |
| 1:55.2 | see the UK finally leave the Union next March with me to discuss this. And much more besides, Christine Ray, she's Professor of European Politics at the Hirtys School of Governments in Berlin. |
| 2:06.6 | Christine, the EU decision as expected. |
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