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.

Everyone interested in modern Russia should read a report out this week on the nation’s deepening demographic crisis.  It’s published by the United Nations Development Programme, but it’s written by a team of Russian academic experts, so no one can say it’s tainted with bias.

The report describes the stark reality of a country whose population is falling fast, to a considerable extent because of rampant alcohol abuse among men, who on average are dying before they make it to 60 years old.  “Short life expectancy is the main feature of this crisis, though by no means its only feature.  The birth rate is too low, the population is shrinking and ageing, and Russia is on the threshold of rapid loss of able-bodied population, which will be accompanied by a growing demographic burden per able-bodied individual.  The number of potential mothers is starting to decline and the country needs to host large flows of immigrants,” the report says.

Since 1992, the natural decrease of Russia’s population has amounted to a staggering 12.3m people.  This has been compensated to some degree by the arrival of 5.7m immigrants.  But many are ethnic Russians from former Soviet republics, and the source is drying up.  Overall, Russia had 142m people at the start of 2008, compared with 148.6m in 1993.  By 2025, the figure will almost certainly fall below 140m and could be as low as 128m.

The implications for Russia’s economy are enormous.  The authors cite forecasts from Rosstat, the national statistics agency, that Russia’s working age population will decline by 14m between now and 2025.  As Vladimir Putin said three years ago when he was president, the demographic emergency is “the most acute problem facing Russia today”.

Alcohol abuse has a very long history indeed in Russia.  Some of the first western European visitors to the ancient Russian heartland were astonished to see Russians of all types, high and low, male and female, drinking themselves into oblivion.  Over time, the Russian (and Soviet) authorities came to depend heavily on revenues from alcohol sales, especially of vodka.  This deterred serious state-led anti-alcohol campaigns.

But as I remember well from several years I spent in Moscow in the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader, tried to change all this, cracking down on alcohol production and sales in a way that earned him the nickname “mineral water secretary”, as opposed to “general secretary”, of the Soviet communist party.  The UN report’s authors say Gorbachev’s 1985-87 campaign had a substantial impact, raising life expectancy for men by 3.1 years and for women by 1.3 years.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, is now trying to do something similar, calling alcoholism a “national disaster”.  The Gorbachev experience suggests that Medvedev may achieve some short-term success, but not much in the longer run.

In the meantime, the really interesting question is this: Where exactly is Russia going to get all its desperately needed immigrants from?  China?  That may raise some delicate issues in Russia’s vast, underpopulated far eastern regions, which formed part of Imperial China until the Tsarist annexations of the 19th century.

Since February 1999, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s anti-bribery convention came into force - with the aim of reducing bribery of foreign officials in international business deals - the US has brought 103 cases, Germany more than 40, France 19 and the UK just one.  So says “Global Corruption Report 2009: Corruption and the Private Sector”, a study published on Wednesday by Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog.

From a British point of view, the report makes uncomfortable reading.  “UK companies still have a long way to go to increase their awareness and adopt robust anti-bribery compliance programmes,” it says.

It adds that, in the light of the 2006 al-Yamamah affair,  when the authorities cited national security reasons to shut down a corruption investigation into a multibillion-pound British arms deal with Saudi Arabia, ”it is essential for the government to improve its enforcement of the [OECD] convention and bring more cases to court.  The government and companies need to raise their game.  Otherwise the United Kingdom will be perceived as a country that is not serious about fighting international corruption.”

Of course, other nations come in for a hammering in the report, too.  Take the so-called BRIC countries, supposedly jumping from strength to strength as the western world drowns in recession and debt.  Everyone from President Dmitry Medvedev to the man in the Moscow metro knows about Russia’s corruption disease, but it is particularly interesting to read what Transparency International says about the club’s other three members: “Firms from India, China and Brazil are regarded by their peers as among the most corrupt when doing business abroad.”

Has international business corruption increased since the global financial crisis exploded?  The report doesn’t really answer this important question.  But it does point to “the hazardous implications of corporate strategies that seek to exploit weak regulation, taxation and disclosure standards in some pockets of the global banking system”.  It also highlights “financial offshore structures whose lack of transparency, regulatory oversight and co-operation facilitate capital flight and tax evasion, while hindering the recovery of public assets stolen by corrupt rulers”.

Better regulation and more effective enforcement of existing rules are obviously the answer.  But let’s not forget what Tacitus, the great Roman senator and historian, said: “It’s the most corrupt state that has the most laws.”

Predictably, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war provoked a few rhetorical skirmishes this week between Russia, Poland and Poland’s western allies.  It reminded me of an unusual evening that I spent in 1989 in Waldkirchen, a small town in southern Germany near the Czech border, on the 50th anniversary of the war.

I was the guest of a German friend who in her youth, when I was a young boy, had lived as an au pair with my family in the UK.  She had spent months walking me to school, taking me swimming, reading me stories and fixing meals for me.  As we grew up, we stayed in touch, and now I was staying the night with her and her husband in Waldkirchen.

I had never met her husband before, but he seemed pleasant enough - until the conversation turned to the origins of the second world war.  He was adamant that Poland, not Germany, had started the war by launching an attack on a German radio station in the town of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice in Poland).  As is well-known, this incident was a Nazi provocation, involving Germans dressed as Polish saboteurs, that was conceived to provide Hitler with an excuse to invade Poland.

However, my friend’s husband would have none of it.  As the evening progressed, a possible explanation emerged for his stubbornness.  He was an ethnic German from the Polish city of Opole (in pre-war times, the German city of Oppeln) who, along with millions of his fellow-nationals, had been expelled after 1945 from his native land as Poland’s borders were shifted to the west.  The pain, injustice and anger of this searing moment in his childhood had stayed in his soul forever.  It blinded him to the truth about the events of late August and early September 1939.

Some Poles no doubt feel that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, adheres to a similarly skewed version of history.  In fact, if you read the whole of his article this week in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, it is considerably more thoughtful and balanced - in spite of its occasional jabs at Poland and the west - than many news reports have suggested.

As for my night in Waldkirchen, it ended well.  My friend, embarrassed at her husband’s behaviour, packed him off to bed.  Then she and I opened some Champagne, and we reminisced about the bad food and weather of England in the 1960s.

To follow up on Monday’s blog, in which I suggested it was extremely unlikely that Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini would achieve his ambition of becoming the European Union’s next foreign policy chief, the obvious question is - well, who will get the job?

Three names keep cropping up.  One is Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, a Dutchman who has served as Nato’s secretary-general since 2004 and who is about to be replaced by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister.  The second is Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, who is another ex-premier.  The third is Olli Rehn, a Finn who is the EU’s enlargement commissioner.

I should stress that, in contrast to Frattini, none of these three is shamelessly promoting himself for the job, which Spain’s Javier Solana has held since 1999.  In fact, Bildt told a group of Brussels-based reporters visiting Stockholm last week that he didn’t want it.  This was no doubt very sensible.  It is a sad but undeniable fact that Bildt, highly experienced and intellectually brilliant though he may be, has a few too many critics and enemies for his own good.

France and Germany think he is sometimes too outspoken about Russia (after he compared Russia’s actions in Georgia last year to Nazi tactics in the 1930s, what Russia thinks of Bildt must be close to unprintable).  The Greek Cypriot-controlled government of Cyprus doesn’t care for Bildt because of his sympathy towards Turkey’s EU membership bid.  The fact that a Dane is about to get the top Nato job means that there will be less enthusiasm in EU capitals for putting a fellow Scandinavian in the EU’s most prestigious foreign policy post.  All in all, I wouldn’t buy Bildts.

Rehn is less controversial and, for that reason, a credible compromise candidate.  Like Bildt, however, he is from the Nordic area - and other EU countries may think that, with Rasmussen at Nato, that’s enough from that corner of Europe for the moment.  In addition, five years as EU enlargement commissioner may not look quite convincing enough on his CV.  My heart says “Buy Rehns” but my head says “Don’t”.

Then there is De Hoop Scheffer.  He has done a competent job at Nato, but it is murmured in Brussels that he lacks the ideas and imagination needed to make a success of the EU’s common foreign policy - often more common on paper than it is in reality.  On the other hand, the EU’s larger countries - France, Germany and the UK - would surely prefer someone who doesn’t cause them trouble.  Let’s put it this way: I’m not buying De Hoop Scheffers today, but I may dip in my wallet later.

Two weeks ago, Russia announced that it intended to join the World Trade Organisation not on its own but as part of a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan.  It was a classic Russian initiative, combining brutal power politics with a healthy dose of surrealism.

For at the time of the announcement, Moscow was in the middle of a trade war with its two neighbours, banning imports of Belarusan dairy products and Kazakh meat.  Russia was also in the process of freezing a $500m credit for Belarus, which in turn was imposing new customs controls on Russian goods.  Acrimonious disputes of this nature do not usually precede the establishment of friendly arrangements such as customs unions.

Still, it has been all too clear during the nine-year rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and ex-president, that Moscow expects its ex-Soviet neighbours to do its bidding in such matters.  Where Russia’s national security and economic interests are concerned, there is no room for objections from countries that were ruled directly from the Kremlin as recently as the late 1980s.

That said, were there any deeper motives behind Russia’s announcement?  After all, Russia was probably within months of gaining WTO membership, and its bid had the support of the US and the European Union.  One Russian economic analyst suggests that Russian government experts conducted an updated cost-benefit analysis of WTO membership and concluded that there were no clear-cut economic advantages to being in rather than out.

This argument may carry particular weight in Moscow in the present harsh global economic climate.  It might be more difficult to protect Russian industries from foreign competition, or alleged foreign dumping, or both, if Russia were already a member of the body that supervises world trade.  Meanwhile, WTO rules do not for the most part cover oil and gas, which together with weapons are Russia’s main exports.

All these arguments are sound enough.  But one other factor I would mention is that Russia, generally speaking, does not warm to genuinely multilateral bodies such as the WTO.  As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform think-tank argued in a thoughtful paper last week, Russia enjoys being one of the five permanent United Nations Security Council members, because that confers uniquely privileged status as well as the right to veto anything it dislikes.  Russia also is happy with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a group that includes the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and is dominated by Russia and China.

But Russia has its difficulties with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose  peace monitors in Georgia will probably have to leave soon, after it proved impossible to meet Russia’s demand that the pro-Russian region of South Ossetia be treated as an independent state.  Like the OSCE, the WTO tries to operates by consensus rather than as a concert of the big powers.  And for the moment, it doesn’t seem that such standards of behaviour suit Russia.

For anyone interested in European energy security, and especially the long-suffering Nabucco gas pipeline project, there was a fascinating piece of news on Monday. The Obama administration appointed Richard Morningstar, a former US ambassador to the European Union, as its special envoy for Eurasian energy issues.

Morningstar has a career background not only in EU affairs but in the energy diplomacy of the Caspian Sea area. As such, there is no one better placed to give the Europeans the benefit of US advice on Nabucco, a project some energy analysts think may be doomed to failure unless resolute action is taken soon to finance it, secure the necessary gas supplies and get it up and running.

The basic idea behind Nabucco is to reduce the EU’s growing dependence on Russian energy by importing gas along a proposed 3,300km-long pipeline from the Caspian, and later from central Asia, through Turkey to Europe.

But it is a project that is of more interest to the EU’s eastern European member-states, many of which were severely affected by last January’s abrupt cut-off of Russian gas deliveries, than to western European countries such as Germany and Italy, which were not affected and which invest a lot of time and effort in securing bilateral energy deals with Moscow.

Moreover, it has never been entirely clear where all the gas for Nabucco is going to come from. Azerbaijan, which the EU has identified as the key supplier in the first instance, has never made a whole-hearted commitment to the project. Russia’s military triumph over Georgia last August raised security questions about Nabucco.

Another problem concerns Turkey, which is withholding its support from Nabucco because the Greek Cypriot-controlled government of Cyprus is blocking the start of talks on the energy section of Turkey’s EU membership negotiations. The Turks are not wholly innocent, though. They see Nabucco as an opportunity to leverage their favourable geographical location to buy gas from the Caspian and elsewhere and sell it on to the EU at a profit. This vision of Turkey as a middleman enriching itself at Europe’s expense infuriates some western Europeans who have never wanted Turkey in the EU anyway.

At a EU summit last month, the tensions were temporarily defused when German chancellor Angela Merkel lifted her objections and agreed that the EU could earmark €200m of seed money for Nabucco. At a time when it is by no means easy to secure funding for any big-ticket investments, let alone one with as many question marks hanging over it as Nabucco, this was undeniably a step forward for the EU. But the total cost of Nabucco is officially estimated at €7.9bn (the final cost will surely be higher), so an awful lot remains to be done.

Meanwhile, the head of Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company was in Moscow last month to sign a memorandum of understanding that pledges the gas from Azerbaijan’s two big new fields to Russia. The deal, though not yet irreversible, could sound the death knell for Nabucco.

Clearly, Morningstar and the Europeans have much hard work ahead of them.

The European Parliament recommended this week that the European Union’s 27 governments, when negotiating a new long-term partnership agreement with Russia, should ask Moscow to provide assurances that it will not use force against its neighbours, as it did in Georgia last August.

The parliament passed the recommendation, which was drawn up by Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a Polish liberal and former leading activist in the independent trade union Solidarity in the Communist era, by 416 votes to 80 with 147 abstentions.