It’s striking that the Czech constitutional court announced its approval of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on Tuesday morning just as the prospect of another Russian gas import crisis began to loom on the EU’s horizon.  For even though the news from Prague is welcome, a moment’s reflection is all you need to remind yourself that the Lisbon treaty will, in and of itself, do very little to help the EU address its most serious foreign and economic policy problems.

The sheer sense of relief at adopting a new EU treaty - it’s taken eight years, required two different texts, gone through three failed referendums and caused endless trouble in countries such as the Czech Republic, Ireland and the UK - risks fostering the delusion that everything will be better once Lisbon is in force.  But this is to fall into the trap of assuming that process can substitute for substance (see Monday’s blog on how the same fallacy affects the EU’s approach to relations with other big powers).

Last January witnessed the eruption of a Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute that deprived a number of eastern European countries of gas supplies for two weeks in the middle of winter.  It was, in many ways, a re-run of a similar episode in January 2006.  Like that crisis, it exposed the EU’s abysmal lack of progress in fashioning a common external energy policy.  The Lisbon treaty will not improve the situation - or, for that matter, make things worse.  What counts is political will, which treaties do not produce out of thin air.

A similar consideration applies to the co-ordination of EU economic and fiscal policy.  It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, with the huge increase in budget deficits and public debts since the start of the financial crisis, the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact - its fiscal rulebook - has become close to irrelevant.  Yet the EU, and the 16-nation eurozone in particular, badly needs a credible system of fiscal controls.  The Lisbon treaty will not provide it.  It can only come from governments acting with a strong sense of responsibility towards each other because they share the same currency.

The truth is, I think, that supporters of the Lisbon treaty have overstated its benefits since it was signed in December 2007, and critics have overstated its defects.  The EU has not ground to a halt because of the lack of a new treaty since it acquired 12 new member-states in 2004 and 2007.  Nor will it be transformed into the world’s most dynamic power once the treaty takes effect.  The best thing you can say about the treaty is that, now it is certain to come into force, there will be no need to say much about it ever again.

As the fuss continues about whether or not Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, will sign the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to a detail that appears to have been generally overlooked.  It concerns Klaus’s demand for a special protocol or legally binding exemption from the treaty’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, which, he says, is necessary to prevent a flood of claims on Czech property from the descendants of the roughly 3m Sudeten Germans expelled from the former Czechoslovakia after the second world war.

Leaving aside Klaus’s dubious assertion that the Charter could be exploited as the basis for such claims, the fact is that the Lisbon treaty already contains a special declaration by the Czech Republic on the Charter.  It is buried near the end of the treaty’s official text in a part called Final Act of the Intergovernmental Conference, Section C: Declarations by Member-States.  The Czech declaration, which is labelled No. 53, sets out the Czech position that “the Charter does not extend the field of application of [European] Union law] and does not establish any new power for the Union”.

It also underlines that “insofar as the Charter recognises fundamental rights and principles as they result from constitutional traditions common to the member-states, those rights and principles are to be interpreted in harmony with those traditions”.

In short, the Lisbon treaty already ring-fences Czech sovereignty insofar as it relates to the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Moreover, as Alexander Vondra, the former Czech EU affairs minister, has pointed out, other EU governments have already agreed with the Czechs that new EU laws cannot be applied retrospectively to back up property claims.

All of which Klaus undoubtedly knows.  What is my conclusion?  That Klaus’s alarmism about Czech vulnerability to German property claims is a legalistic ruse, a political manoeuvre, and not a serious legal point at all.

What is his real aim?  Ideally, he would like to torpedo the Lisbon treaty.  But he knows this will be all but impossible, if the Czech constitutional court gives a positive ruling on the treaty in the next couple of weeks.  So his fallback position is to extract a declaration from other EU leaders giving a superfluous guarantee for the Czech Republic.

Then he can hold aloft this declaration in front of his countrymen, and - hey presto! - to borrow a phrase, it will be “peace in our time”.

It was inevitable, I think, that Czech President Vaclav Klaus would take his last stand against the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on the Sudeten German issue.  This has been one of the most highly charged themes of Czech politics since the former Czechoslovakia threw off communism in 1989.  By raising it, Klaus aims to break out of the extreme political isolation into which his hostility to Lisbon has pushed him on both the Czech and the wider European stage.  But it is a step that smacks of desperation as much as of calculation.

The Sudeten German question touches a genuinely raw nerve among some Czechs.  It relates to the several million ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the second world war at the behest of the Prague authorities, who were convinced - with good reason - that large numbers of the German minority had served as a Nazi fifth column.  Some Czech politicians have proved willing to play on the fears of ordinary Czechs that descendants of the Sudeten Germans may one day succeed, through legal action, in reclaiming the property of which their forebears were stripped. 

Klaus says he wants a clause attached to the Lisbon treaty guaranteeing that the European Court of Justice will never invalidate the so-called Benes decrees, the act under which the Sudeten Germans - as well as a smaller number of ethnic Hungarians - were expelled from their homes.  “The last Czech government did not pay enough attention to this question, so vitally important for the Czech Republic,” he said last Friday.

It is undeniable that property issues remain sensitive in the EU.  Denmark, with one eye on its German neighbours to the south, restricts foreign ownership of holiday homes.  Poland, like the Czech Republic, frets about potential property claims from ethnic Germans expelled from territories that Poland was awarded in 1945, in compensation for land lost to the Soviet Union.

But the sensitivities are most acute in the Czech Republic, perhaps because it is a smaller country than Poland.  The claims for restitution are loudest in parts of Germany and Austria close to the Czech borders.  In both countries, important political parties are sympathetic to the expellees’ campaigns - Bavaria’s Christian Social Union and the Austrian Freedom Party.  The Austrian party’s late leader, Jörg Haider, used to provoke the Czechs by likening the treatment of the Sudeten Germans to the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews.

Some Czechs may feel Klaus is justified in demanding his guarantee.  But others will see it as a last throw of the dice to disrupt ratification of Lisbon.  After all, every single government and parliament in the 27-nation EU has now approved the charter.  There must be at least a sneaking suspicion that, if upholding the legality of the Benes decrees at European level is a matter of such existential importance to his nation, Klaus left it remarkably late in the day to bring it up.

With Czech President Vaclav Klaus the chief remaining obstacle to final ratification of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, there has been a fair amount of loose talk about how the Czech Republic could - or should - be punished if Klaus refuses to sign it.  On the one hand, supporters of the treaty say it is intolerable that the EU’s eight-year effort at redesigning its institutions should be sabotaged at the finishing post.  If Klaus carries on his delaying tactics much longer, they warn, the Czechs should be denied a seat in the next European Commission.

On the other hand, opponents of the Lisbon treaty are painting the same scenario for quite different reasons.  Just you watch, they say.  The EU will reveal itself as an intolerant, anti-democratic machine, whipping the Czechs merely because they have the temerity to resist the imposition of a treaty they fear undermines their sovereignty.

Most, if not all, of this is not serious.  Some leaders, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, are impatient with Klaus.  But EU governments as a whole are not threatening to punish the Czechs.  After all, the Czech parliament has approved the treaty and the Czech government is in favour of it.  Klaus is more and more isolated.

More importantly, the EU is an organisation whose first instinct is to do things by forging a consensus, not by crushing dissent.  Pace Klaus, it is not the Soviet Union reinvented.  The EU’s culture of consensus is both its weakness and, at times like this, its strength.

The EU learnt a sobering lesson in 2000, when Austria formed a coalition government including the far-right Freedom Party of the late Jörg Haider.  The EU’s other 14 member-states punished Austria by downgrading relations and freezing contacts with Austrian ministers.  It seemed a clever idea at the time.  But it ended up producing the opposite effect to that intended, by making a martyr of the Austrian government and by stiffening the patriotic pride of the Austrian people (not just Austrians on the right, either).

Moreover, the EU contains an awful lot of small and medium-sized countries, especially in central and eastern Europe, which suspect that, if ever the Czech Republic were punished for stepping out of line, their turn would come, sooner or later, over some other issue.

One final point.  Many intemperate calls to punish the Czechs have come from the European Parliament.  And it is indeed true that, if Klaus is still holding out when the parliament conducts hearings for the new European Commission, some MEPs may give the Czech nominee a particularly hard grilling.  In extremis, they could even refuse to give the entire Commission the green light because of the Klaus problem.

If they do, someone should remind them that their legislature just got elected on the smallest and most dismal turnout - 43 per cent - of any European Parliament election in history.

The early results look pretty conclusive: Irish voters have approved the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, possibly by a very large margin.  A poll by the opposition Fine Gael party suggests the pro-Lisbon forces may have taken between 60 and 65 per cent of the vote.

That would be a comprehensive turnaround from the 53.4 to 46.6 per cent victory for the No camp in the June 2008 referendum in Ireland.  Voters in Dublin seem to have given overwhelming backing to the treaty, according to RTE, the Irish state broadcaster.

So, if it’s Yes, what happens next?  All eyes will turn to Prague, where the virulently anti-Lisbon head of state, Vaclav Klaus, has so far refused to sign the Lisbon treaty, even though the Czech parliament has ratified it.  Once the Irish result is official, Klaus may well say something along the lines of “That’s all very well, but here in my country 17 senators have just launched a challenge to the treaty in our constitutional court.  I’m not budging until the court has issued its ruling.  Anything else would fly in the face of my presidential duties under the law.”

The truth is that none of us knows what Klaus will do.  But I have a hunch he will eventually sign the treaty - though possibly not until a EU summit scheduled to be held in Brussels on October 29-30.  That is the meeting where EU leaders would like to choose the bloc’s first full-time president and its new head of foreign policy.  Klaus may not want to allow them that pleasure.

Now that José Manuel Barroso is safely re-installed as European Commission president for the next five years, it would be tempting to think that - from an institutional point of view, at least - all is well in Brussels.  Tempting, but wrong.

Once again, it is our old friend the Lisbon treaty that is the problem.  On October 2 Irish voters, who rejected the treaty in a referendum in June 2008, will have the chance to reverse their verdict.  Opinion polls indicate that the Yes camp will win this time.  But there is an unmistakeable air of nervousness at the European Union’s headquarters that the polls may not be a reliable guide to the eventual outcome.

The fundamental problem is Ireland’s economic collapse over the past 12 months, which has plunged the government’s popularity ratings to unprecedented depths.  The public mood is as sour as a pint of stale Guinness.  In this climate, anti-Lisbon campaigners are finding some voters receptive to the argument that, since pro-Lisbon politicians ruined the economy, why should they be trusted when they say the treaty is good for Ireland?

But the Irish referendum is not the only cloud on the EU’s horizon.  For even if Ireland votes Yes, there remain considerable doubts over when Václav Klaus, the Czech president, will append his signature to the Lisbon treaty, allowing it to take force.  Fears are growing in Brussels that Klaus intends to find an excuse to delay signing as long as possible - certainly, until some time in the first half of next year.

The EU will then face its ultimate nightmare - that the Lisbon treaty will not have been ratified by the time that the UK holds its next general election, due by June.  The rampantly anti-Lisbon Conservative party is widely expected to win the election, and Tory leaders have made clear that, if Lisbon is unratified when they take power, they will call a referendum on the treaty.  All the evidence suggests the British would vote No.

If events take this course, it will poison the atmosphere in the EU and make it even harder than it is now to defend all the good things about the 27-nation bloc, such as the single European market and the successful knitting together of western and eastern Europe.  Troubling times, indeed.

Say what you like about Nicolas Sarkozy, he certainly knows how to capture your attention.  At a meeting in the Elysée Palace last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it appears that the French president recommended in no uncertain terms that Avigdor Lieberman, the hardline foreign minister, should be dropped from the Israeli cabinet and replaced with Tzipi Livni, the less abrasive opposition leader.

“Grave and unacceptable!” fumed Lieberman’s spokesman - how dare the leader of one democracy interfere in the internal affairs of another?

Here in Stockholm, where Sweden has just started its six-month European Union presidency, there are mixed views on Sarkozy.  On the one hand, Swedish government ministers are the first to recognise that, when France held the EU presidency at a critical moment in world affairs in the second half of 2008, Sarkozy - within the limits of the EU’s possibilities - provided vigorous and effective leadership.

On the other hand, the Swedes are more than a little suspicious that Sarkozy may be trying to delay José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president, in order to put pressure on him to appoint a French politician to a top portfolio in the next Commission, due to be picked in a few months’ time.  Whatever portfolio the French are after, goes the thinking, it is unlikely to be good news for Europe’s commitment to competition and free trade.

Well, the French aren’t the only ones playing this game.  I have spoken over recent weeks with representatives from most of the 27 EU countries, and I have yet to hear anyone say the job their country wants is that of commissioner for multilingualism (held at present by, er, Romania’s Leonard Orban).

Surely the truth is that what Sarkozy said to Netanyahu about Lieberman is what most EU leaders think - but don’t have the guts to say even privately to their Israeli counterparts.  Der Spiegel, the German magazine, calls Lieberman a “pragmatic thug” - and that is one of the kinder descriptions one comes across in Europe.

It strikes me as infantile to complain that Sarkozy is “interfering” in the internal affairs of another country, when every public posture the EU has struck since Lieberman’s appointment as foreign minister makes it perfectly plain that the EU thinks Livni would be infinitely preferable to Lieberman.  The EU may be right or may be wrong about that - but at least with Sarkozy you know where you are.

Hello, hello, hello, what’s this, then?  Another attempt by Czech President Vaclav Klaus to derail the European Union’s Lisbon treaty?  Surely not!  Let’s take a closer look.  Oh, my God, yes, it’s true.  And how could we ever have doubted it?  Because the thing about Klaus is that if it looks like pork and dumplings, and it smells like pork and dumplings, and it tastes like pork and dumplings, then you can bet your life that it definitely is pork and dumplings.

The Czech Republic’s six-month EU presidency comes to an end on June 30.  This date once looked likely to mark Klaus’s departure from the EU stage.  Instead, it now appears certain that Klaus - who delights in being one of the least liked EU leaders of all time - will press on with his campaign to sabotage the Lisbon treaty.

The story so far: Irish voters rejected the treaty last June, but latest opinion polls indicate that they will reverse their verdict in a second referendum, expected in October.  In order to hold this referendum, however, the Irish government needs legal guarantees of its national sovereignty in the fields of taxation, military neutrality and right-to-life policies.

Ireland will receive these guarantees from its EU partners at the Brussels summit that opens on Thursday.  But the cunning Klaus says that the guarantees amount to new legal arrangements that, under the Czech constitution, will require ratification by the Czech parliament.

Now, the Czech parliament finally ratified the Lisbon treaty last month after an agonising political struggle that contributed to the previous government’s downfall in March.  It would seem crazy for the parliament to go through this painful process a second time.  Sure enough, Jan Fischer, the new Czech prime minister, disputes Klaus’s interpretation of the constitution and says there is no need for parliamentary approval of the Irish guarantees.

But Fischer is a non-party, caretaker premier who won’t be in office a few months from now, because the Czech Republic is to hold a general election.  Klaus, by contrast, will still be up there in Prague Castle - the perfect place for him, if you remember the mysterious castle in Franz Kafka’s novel of the same name. And let us not forget, Klaus still hasn’t completed the Czech Republic’s formal ratification of the Lisbon treaty by adding his presidential signature to parliament’s approval of it in May.

So what is Klaus’s game?  Is he toying with the idea of delaying Czech ratification of the Lisbon treaty for so long that eventually a eurosceptic Tory government comes to power in the UK and holds a British referendum that produces a clear No to the treaty, thereby killing it forever?  It no longer looks like such a wild theory.