Atta boy, Klaus!

So ends the twilight zone of uncertainty surrounding the EU's Lisbon Treaty. The last vestige of resistance to a process that would streamline decision-making in the EU and make it into the global power it should be has vanished.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a free market economist par excellence, accepted the decision of a Czech constitutional court, which rejected a complaint against Lisbon, and subsequently ratified it just a short time ago.

As such, a new European Council president post is in the offing, as well as a common foreign minister that will trump the current arrangement of a foreign affairs representative and the external affairs commissioner. Time now, it seems, is of the essence -- bien sur, I say, given that this whole affair with the Lisbon Treaty has been in an uncertain pipeline since the early summer of 2008, when the Irish electorate voted, in a referendum, against it (they subsequently affirmed support through a second referendum held recently).

From the report: "The Eurosceptic Czech leader had recently said he would no longer attempt to block the treaty, after receiving the promise of an opt-out from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights." It seems that this opt-out was driven, yet again, by the need to "avoid property claims from ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II."

A further step, then, which is cause for celebration. The bit about the Sudeten Germans, however, remains the sore spot it was post-1945, but that is another story.