Four Conversations on Canada Association and Democratic Power
Why Strategic Conversations?
European integration has always been shaped by ideas as much as by institutions. While treaties, negotiations and reforms define the formal architecture of enlargement, the future of Europe is equally influenced by the strategic conversations that precede political decisions. As the European Union enters a period marked by geopolitical competition, democratic uncertainty and institutional transformation, enlargement itself is becoming the subject of a new generation of questions.
The debate is no longer confined to the pace of negotiations or the fulfilment of accession benchmarks. It increasingly concerns the strategic purpose of enlargement, the resilience of democratic institutions, the consequences of prolonged uncertainty, the role of anticipatory governance and the societal foundations upon which European integration ultimately depends.
These are not questions that lend themselves to simple or definitive answers. They require dialogue between European institutions, national governments, researchers, civil society and citizens. They require the willingness to look beyond immediate political developments and consider the longer-term choices that will shape the future of both the European Union and its candidate countries.
PRESPA Strategic Conversations is conceived as a contribution to that dialogue.
Rather than offering policy prescriptions, the series seeks to stimulate informed reflection on emerging issues relevant to European integration, democratic governance and strategic resilience. Each issue brings together a small number of strategic conversations intended to encourage debate, challenge assumptions and explore new perspectives on the evolving European project.
Beyond Membership
In her 2026 State of the Union address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed opening the door for Canada to become the European Union’s first associate member. The expression does not appear in the Treaties, and its institutional meaning remains undefined. Yet the proposal was more than rhetorical. It linked Canada to a common prosperity and economic security space, deeper technological cooperation, integrated defence industrial capacity and joint work on energy, critical minerals, the Arctic, artificial intelligence and cyber security.
This initiative invites a wider conversation about the political architecture now forming around the European Union. Membership has traditionally marked the boundary between participation in the Union’s constitutional order and cooperation from outside it. In practice, that boundary has long contained many variations: the European Economic Area, association agreements, candidate status, participation in EU programmes, sectoral regulatory alignment and differentiated integration among Member States. Associate membership would add a politically powerful, but legally uncertain, category to this landscape.
The first examines whether the proposed association with Canada signals the emergence of a wider European order built around concentric forms of belonging and asks whether such differentiated participation can extend Europe’s strategic reach without creating new and permanent hierarchies.
The second explores how far political ambition can advance ahead of established legal authority and institutional design and asks whether “associate membership” can be constructed through the existing Treaties or would ultimately require treaty change and explicit national authorisation.
The third considers whether the institutional imagination demonstrated in the Canadian proposal could also reinvigorate gradual integration for candidate countries or whether new forms of association risk making prolonged non-membership more acceptable and easier to manage.
The fourth reflects on the democratic consequences of an increasingly geopolitical and presidential European Commission and asks whether Europe can expand its strategic power without weakening parliamentary authority, political competition and democratic consent within its Member States.
Together, they advance a cautious proposition. The Canadian initiative may give Europe greater strategic reach and may stimulate useful institutional innovation. Its value, however, will depend on whether different forms of participation are clearly distinguished, democratically authorised and connected to their stated destination. A flexible European order can create bridges. Without legal clarity and political consent, it can also institutionalise hierarchy.
Strategic Conversation I
The Emerging Architecture of European Belonging
The Question
Relations with the European Union are usually described through familiar categories: membership, candidacy, association, neighbourhood policy or strategic partnership. Von der Leyen’s Canadian proposal unsettles those categories. Canada does not seek accession, yet the language of associate membership suggests more than cooperation between external partners. Is the EU creating one exceptional relationship, or is it beginning to organise a wider European strategic order through differentiated forms of belonging?
The Context
The substance announced for Canada is extensive. The proposed Alliance for the Future would move beyond the existing Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement and connect economic security, advanced manufacturing, defence production, energy, critical minerals, batteries, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, cyber security and the Arctic. Canada already participates in European research and has become closely connected to emerging European defence arrangements.
None of these areas alone requires a new membership category. Together, however, they describe a relationship that crosses the conventional boundaries between trade, regulation, security and foreign policy. It is therefore the combination, rather than any individual instrument, that gives the proposal constitutional significance.
The Conversation
The European Union has never been as uniform as the language of membership sometimes implies. Member States participate differently in the euro, Schengen, defence cooperation and justice and home affairs. Non-members can gain deep access to the Single Market, participate in programmes, align with EU rules or join structured security arrangements. Candidate countries increasingly receive selected benefits before accession. Europe’s political order already consists of overlapping fields of participation.
Associate membership could make this implicit reality more explicit. A strategic partner might enter defined areas of European cooperation without seeking representation in the Union’s institutions or accepting the full body of EU law. For the EU, this would extend regulatory reach, strengthen supply chains and increase collective capacity. For Canada, it would diversify economic and security relationships while preserving national autonomy.
The attraction of such a model is clear in a fragmented international environment. The Union needs partners that share democratic commitments and can contribute material capabilities. Full enlargement cannot be the answer to every strategic relationship, especially when the partner is not a European state and does not seek accession. A recognised external tier could offer structure, visibility and durability beyond a collection of separate agreements.
Yet concentric arrangements also establish hierarchy. The decisive questions are who defines each circle, what rights and obligations attach to it, and whether movement between circles is possible. A flexible architecture can accommodate different ambitions, but it can also consolidate a powerful centre surrounded by states that apply European rules without participating equally in their formation.
Canada may be a politically attractive first case precisely because it does not demand an answer to the enlargement question. It can demonstrate the advantages of deeper association without immediately requiring the Union to decide whether association is a destination, a staging point or an alternative to membership. That ambiguity creates room for innovation. It also postpones the most difficult political choices.
Why This Matters?
The Canadian proposal may be the first visible step towards a wider system of European affiliation. Understanding that system matters because categories shape expectations, bargaining power and democratic rights. If Europe is moving towards concentric forms of belonging, those circles should be designed deliberately rather than assembled through unrelated agreements whose cumulative constitutional effect becomes clear only later.
Strategic Conversation II
The Legal Limits of Political Ambition
The Question
The phrase associate member gave the Canadian initiative political force, but the EU Treaties do not establish such a status. They provide a route to membership for European states and a legal basis for association with third countries. They do not identify an intermediate constitutional category. How far can the Commission advance this proposal under existing law, and when would political innovation require treaty revision or explicit national authorisation?
The Context
Article 49 of the Treaty on the European Union governs accession. It connects eligibility to being a European state, requires respect for the Union’s values and gives the Member States and European Parliament decisive roles. Canada is not pursuing this route and has stated that it does not seek full membership.
Article 217 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union permits agreements establishing an association involving reciprocal rights and obligations, common action and special procedures. Article 218 provides the procedure for negotiating and concluding international agreements. These provisions offer considerable flexibility, but an association agreement remains an instrument of external relations. It does not create membership in the Union.
The Conversation
Much of what von der Leyen proposed can be developed without changing the Treaties. The EU and Canada can deepen trade, regulatory cooperation, research participation, digital arrangements, energy partnerships and defence industrial links. Joint bodies can supervise agreements and provide consultation. Programme rules can permit participation by associated third countries. Political declarations can give these instruments a common strategic direction.
The legal threshold changes when association begins to resemble institutional membership. Formal voting rights in EU bodies, representation within the Union’s institutions, a general right to participate in decision-making or a constitutional status equivalent to a reduced form of membership would be difficult to construct through an ordinary external agreement. The Union cannot use international agreements to alter the essential character of its institutions or bypass powers that the Treaties assign to the Member States.
This does not make the proposal empty. Associate membership could become a political umbrella for a legally plural arrangement. Its content might be built from several agreements and programme decisions rather than one constitutional act. The result could be substantively important even if the term itself never acquires a distinct Treaty definition.
Von der Leyen’s intervention can therefore be read as institutional entrepreneurship. By announcing an ambitious destination, the Commission President creates a political question that governments must now answer. The label attracts public attention, signals commitment to Canada and encourages officials to identify the legal instruments needed to give it substance. Political momentum precedes legal design.
This method has often driven European integration, but it carries a democratic risk. Once a proposal has been publicly celebrated as a European strategic necessity, legal and parliamentary scrutiny may be treated as delay rather than as part of legitimate decision-making. Governments can face pressure to approve the instruments required to fulfil a promise they did not visibly formulate. The Commission, meanwhile, gains agenda-setting authority without possessing the unilateral power to complete what it announced.
Legal clarity need not defeat ambition. It can protect it. A credible proposal should identify which elements rest on current competences, which require Council authorisation and European Parliament consent, where national ratification may be necessary, and which institutional rights would require treaty change. The more powerful the language of belonging becomes, the more precise this division of authority must be.
Why This Matters?
Associate membership currently describes a political intention rather than an existing legal status. The distinction is essential. Strategic language can mobilise action, but durable integration requires a transparent account of competences, procedures, rights and obligations. Otherwise, legal ambiguity may strengthen the initiative in the short term while weakening its legitimacy when national and European institutions begin defining its real limits.
Strategic Conversation III
Association as a Bridge or as an alternative to Enlargement
The Question
For candidate countries, the Canadian proposal carries a meaning that extends beyond EU-Canada relations. It shows that the Union can invent new forms of participation when strategic circumstances demand them. This may encourage more ambitious gradual integration during accession. It may also give enlargement-sceptical Member States a model for offering extensive participation without membership. Will association become a bridge into the Union, or a more acceptable way of remaining outside it?
The Context
The EU has increasingly separated participation from the final act of accession. Candidate countries can enter programmes, receive investment, integrate into parts of the Single Market and align with foreign and security policy before becoming members. This responds to a genuine weakness in the traditional process: reforms can take years to produce visible benefits, while the political promise of membership remains distant.
Gradual integration can restore incentives by connecting progress to tangible participation. Yet every successful intermediate arrangement also reduces the immediate cost of delay. If candidates receive many functional benefits without institutional membership, reluctant Member States may find indefinite postponement easier to sustain.
The Conversation
From North Macedonia, the political contrast is especially sharp. The country signed its Stabilisation and Association Agreement in 2001, applied for membership in 2004 and became a candidate in 2005. Its accession path has repeatedly been affected by disputes and conditions that extended beyond the ordinary assessment of reforms. Citizens have therefore learned to distinguish formal European promises from the political will required to fulfil them.
The Canadian offer may deepen frustration because it demonstrates institutional imagination directed elsewhere. Canada is not required to undergo accession conditionality and does not seek full membership, yet it has been offered a new political category accompanied by a detailed strategic agenda. Western Balkan candidates were again assured that their future lies in the Union, but the practical route remains governed by familiar procedures, national vetoes and uneven political attention.
The two cases are legally different. Their political comparison is nevertheless valid. Citizens do not assess European credibility only through Treaty categories. They observe which problems generate new instruments and which are allowed to persist. They see whether strategic urgency expands what Brussels considers possible.
The constructive response is not to oppose Canada’s closer association. It is to apply the same capacity for innovation to accession. Candidate countries should be able to enter European policies, programmes and decision-shaping arrangements in stages that correspond to verified reforms. Participation should become deeper as obligations are met, and safeguards should protect both the Union and the credibility of the process.
One condition is indispensable: the destination must remain explicit. A status created for a non-European partner that does not seek membership cannot become the unspoken endpoint for European candidates that do. Gradual integration requires a protected link to Article 49 accession, objective conditions for progression and a clear distinction between participation in selected policies and equal membership in the institutions.
Without that link, differentiated integration can turn enlargement from transformation into containment. Candidate countries would remain aligned, economically connected and strategically useful while lacking equal influence over the rules they apply. The Union would gain stability at its periphery without resolving the political question of belonging.
Why This Matters?
Canada’s association can support enlargement only if it expands the Union’s institutional imagination without blurring the membership promise made to candidates. The test is whether differentiated participation creates movement and agency or merely manages prolonged exclusion. For North Macedonia and the Western Balkans, an intermediate stage has value only when it remains a credible stage rather than a renamed destination.
Strategic Conversation IV
European Power and Democratic Consent
The Question
The debate over associate membership is also a debate about who authorises European power. The Commission increasingly acts as the executive centre of a geopolitical Union, while national governments and parliaments remain the principal sites of democratic accountability. What happens to national politics when major European initiatives are announced before their legal form, costs and domestic obligations have been debated?
The Context
Successive crises have expanded the Commission’s role in areas once dominated by national authority. It has coordinated vaccine procurement, common borrowing, sanctions, energy policy, industrial support and defence-related initiatives. These actions have often answered real collective needs that individual states could not address effectively on their own.
Von der Leyen has reinforced this development through a presidential style of agenda-setting. Her Commission does not merely administer agreed policies. It identifies strategic imperatives, frames Europe-wide responses and asks other institutions to construct the means of delivery. The Canadian proposal follows this pattern: the political destination was announced before its legal and institutional route was settled.
The Conversation
A more capable Europe is not inherently less democratic. Joint action can protect the capacity of European societies to choose their own policies in the face of military threats, economic coercion and technological dependence. Citizens cannot exercise meaningful sovereignty through national institutions alone when the problems confronting them operate at continental or global scale.
The democratic problem arises from the sequence and distribution of authority. When the Commission claims the language of strategic ambition, national governments are often left to negotiate details and absorb domestic political costs. Parliaments may examine agreements only after expectations have formed and external partners have invested in the outcome. Their formal power remains, but the political cost of using it increases.
This weakens the space occupied by mainstream democratic competition. Governing parties can describe contested choices as European obligations even when they participated in making them. Opposition parties struggle to offer alternatives to negotiations conducted among executives. National legislatures risk appearing either compliant or obstructive rather than genuinely formative.
Anti-system actors benefit from this gap. They can depict European integration as executive rule exercised above citizens and outside effective national control. An undefined category such as associate membership is particularly vulnerable to this interpretation. Its ambiguity allows supporters to project strategic possibility and opponents to project hidden constitutional expansion.
The wider architecture also affects political systems beyond the Union. Candidate-country governments may present partial access as proof of progress, while opponents describe it as permanent second-class status. Pro-European actors become responsible for defending a process whose endpoint depends on decisions beyond their control. The result can be declining trust in both national institutions and the European promise.
The answer is not to return every European decision to twenty-seven separate national arenas. It is to connect European initiative more visibly to democratic authorisation. Governments should explain the positions they take in the Council. National parliaments should debate the purpose and boundaries of new strategic arrangements early enough to influence them. The European Parliament should scrutinise both the external agreement and the institutional model it may establish. Candidate countries and affected societies should also participate in discussions about an architecture that may determine their future.
Von der Leyen’s ambition may be described as imperial in institutional scale: the Commission seeks to organise a wider regulatory, economic and security space around the Union. It should not be called imperialist when partners enter voluntarily and retain sovereignty. The relevant question is whether this wider order will be governed through transparent consent or through accumulated executive decisions whose constitutional significance emerges only afterwards.
Why This Matters?
Europe may become more powerful externally while European authority becomes more contested internally. Strategic capacity will endure only if citizens can identify where decisions were authorised, how national interests were represented and how policy can be challenged or changed. Democratic consent is not an obstacle to geopolitical action. It is the condition that allows such action to survive political change.