Hooray! Today’s the day that the Lisbon Treaty finally comes into effect in the European Union! As a result, the Union’s operations will from now on supposdly be more transparent, more effective, and more democratic. Those, at least, are the three elements that made up the principal content of the Laeken Declaration issued by EU leaders at their summit in December, 2001, in which they noted how the actual operation and accomplishments of the Union had become disappointing to so many, and so called for the setting-up of a convention to consider what could be done about that.

Inevitably, there remain many within the boundaries of the EU who go beyond mere disappointment to an outright rejection of that process that began at Laeken (that’s in Belgium, by the way) and ended up, through many twists and turns that included a rejected EU Constitution, with the Lisbon Treaty. Most prominent in this regard are the Czechs, if only because Czech president Václav Klaus was the last obstacle to the ratification of that treaty, holding out until only one month ago. Klaus was finally forced to knuckle under, but Czech anti-Lisbon opinion will not let this day pass without at least one more loud cry of protest. Thus it is that we get this article in today’s on-line edition of the Czech daily Lidové noviny. (Those signs brandished in the photo up top read “We want a Europe of free nations” and “We don’t want EU vetoes/prohibitions”; and the Czech word “dost” that’s also there simply means “enough.”)

That this sort of piece should appear on lidovky.cz is no surprise, since that newspaper – otherwise quite a mainline Czech broadsheet worth recommending, by the way – has through the years consistently provided a platform for the writings of Václav Klaus, whether in or out of power. This time it’s not Klaus himself who wrote the article – he’s still president, after all, so that would truly be rather too awkward – but instead one Michal Petřík, an advisor to President Klaus. (more…)

They’re getting impatient out there in the outside world for Obama – real impatient. Last week’s attacks in Mumbai only made this situation worse, to the point that India’s crisis has somehow become Barack Obama’s crisis. This we read even in the normally-sober Financial Times Deutschland, in an article by Washington correspondent Sabine Muscat: “Evil prophecy for Obama.” The lede: “He is not yet president. And still the attacks in India are the first test of the foreign-policy man Barack Obama.”

In truth, this “Barack Obama’s first foreign policy test” has been a red-hot label looking for something to which to affix itself ever since he won the election, if not even before. For one thing, remember the remarks on the campaign-trail by Joe Biden – comments apparently not particularly welcomed by the Obama campaign – about how there surely would occur some international crisis early in the new administration, one deliberately engineered to test the new president’s resolve. As Muscat points out, this “evil prophecy” was also a line White House press spokesperson Dana Perino was pushing – for obvious partisan purpose – just before the election, and it was certainly part of John McCain’s own pitch, implicitly if not explicitly. In these early-transition days, then, it would not have taken much of an unpleasant nature, happening anywhere in the world, to turn into “Obama’s first foreign challenge,” with all eyes swiveling to Chicago to see what he intended to do about it. (more…)