The European Union is generally rather fond of categories. There are Member States, candidate countries, potential candidates, European Economic Area countries, associated countries, strategic partners, third countries associated with individual programmes and third countries very specifically not associated with those programmes. Somewhere in Brussels, one suspects, there is a taxonomy for the taxonomy. This week, however, Europe did something rather less characteristically tidy. In her State of the Union address on 16 September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed opening the door for Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member.” She placed the idea inside a much broader “Alliance for the Future”: a common prosperity and economic-security space covering advanced manufacturing, defence industries, the Arctic, energy, critical minerals, batteries, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, cybersecurity and economic security. There is just one small institutional detail. The European Union does not currently have a general membership category called associate member. The ordinary accession route under Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union is written for a “European State”. The EU does have powers under Article 217 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to conclude association agreements with third countries, involving reciprocal rights, obligations, common action and special procedures. But that is not an off-the-shelf status called “associate membership” into which Canada can simply be inserted after completing the appropriate form in triplicate. A day after von der Leyen’s speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the ambition and supplied considerably more detail about what Canada would like the relationship to contain. His proposals included closer cooperation in critical minerals, defence production, AI and computing capacity, energy, space and payments; smoother digital trade in non-agricultural goods and services; deeper financial integration; stronger youth mobility; Canadian membership of Erasmus+; and participation in the next generation of Horizon Europe. So we have reached an unusually interesting point in European integration: the political ambition is visible, several pieces of the practical integration already exist, and the constitutional label remains under construction. This is therefore not a story about Canada joining the European Union. It is about a more interesting question. How many parts of Europe can a country join without joining the Union itself? First, Canada and Europe did not suddenly discover one another in Strasbourg The easiest way to misread this week’s announcement is to imagine Canada and the EU standing on opposite sides of the Atlantic until geopolitical anxiety suddenly caused them to exchange telephone numbers. The relationship is already substantial. CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, has been provisionally applied since September 2017. EU–Canada trade in goods reached €81.5 billion in 2025, 76% higher than in 2016, while bilateral services trade reached €49 billion, up 91% over the same period. The EU is Canada’s second-largest trading partner. CETA also supplies an early warning about the difference between political announcements and European institutional reality. Almost nine years into provisional application, only 17 of the EU’s 27 Member States have completed their national ratification processes. Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Slovenia still have not. Before Europe constructs an entirely new relationship with Canada, then, there remains the small matter of fully ratifying the old one. That is not merely a Brussels joke. It tells us something important about what follows. European international agreements can operate, deepen and produce real economic effects while parts of their legal architecture remain unresolved for years. The announcement of an “associate membership” relationship is therefore the beginning of an institutional process, not evidence that the process has already happened. Meanwhile, cooperation has continued growing around CETA rather than waiting politely for every national parliament to finish. In 2025, Canada and the EU established a Security and Defence Partnership. In June 2026, Canada became the first non-European country formally able to participate in procurement under SAFE, the EU’s Security Action for Europe instrument. That means Canadian companies and Canadian-origin products can participate in parts of common European defence procurement under the agreement. A few days before the Strasbourg speeches, Canadian and European leaders were already pointing to the first Canadian contract under SAFE. This is rather more consequential than the diplomatic language might suggest: Canadian firms are no longer merely cooperating with European defence companies from the outside. They can participate inside a specific EU procurement framework. And defence is not the only example. Horizon Europe has already shown what partial integration looks like In July 2024, Canada became associated with Pillar II of Horizon Europe, the enormous part of the EU research programme devoted to collaborative work on global challenges and industrial competitiveness. Canadian universities, researchers and organisations can participate there on broadly equal terms with their European counterparts. They can join and lead consortia and receive Horizon Europe funding directly. This is easy to overlook because research programmes don’t receive the theatrical lighting of summits and parliamentary speeches. But institutionally, it is quite revealing. Canada did not need to become an EU Member State to become integrated into one of the EU’s major research systems. That existing arrangement also helps clarify Carney’s proposal for Canadian participation in the next generation of Horizon. He is not proposing that Canada suddenly discover European research cooperation. He is proposing continuity and potentially deeper participation beyond the current framework. This is where the emerging model becomes visible. Instead of imagining one enormous gate marked EU MEMBERSHIP, imagine a building with many doors. Research is one door. Defence procurement is another. Digital trade may become another. Education and youth mobility could become another. Critical-mineral supply chains, financial services and technological cooperation may produce still more. Canada is already through some of them. Erasmus+ may matter more than the strategic sectors in the spotlight The headline sectors in the new alliance are exactly the ones one would expect in 2026: defence, AI, critical minerals, energy, quantum technologies and economic security. But one of Carney’s proposals may ultimately tell us more about the durability of the relationship than any of those. He explicitly proposed Canadian membership of Erasmus+, arguing that it could expand opportunities for Canadian and European students and strengthen long-term ties between the two societies. Canada is not currently fully associated with Erasmus+. Under the current programme rules, EU Member States and a limited group of associated third countries participate fully across the programme. Countries such as Canada belong to the much larger category of third countries not associated with the programme, which can participate only in particular actions under specific conditions. The distinction matters because Erasmus stopped being merely a university-exchange programme a long time ago. It now connects universities, schools, vocational education, civil society organisations, adult learning, staff mobility, sport and large networks of institutional cooperation. Since 1987, Erasmus and its predecessor programmes have provided international learning opportunities to more than 16 million people. The Commission’s latest evaluation found that more than 6.2 million participated in learning mobility during 2014–2020 and around another 1.6 million between 2021 and 2023. It also concluded that the programme has contributed to common values, civic participation and a shared identity. Those effects make Erasmus politically unusual. Trade agreements connect markets. Research programmes connect institutions. Defence agreements connect states and industries. Erasmus has spent nearly four decades connecting biographies. A Portuguese student acquires friends in Poland. A Bulgarian youth worker builds a project with a Spanish organisation. A French vocational teacher returns from Finland with different ideas about training. People acquire colleagues, partners, languages, professional networks and an intuitive familiarity with countries that previously existed largely as shapes on maps. Much of the EU has been built through law. Erasmus added something law cannot manufacture so easily: repeated personal experience of other European societies. Canadian association could begin extending that infrastructure across the Atlantic. The interesting effects would not flow in only one direction. European participants would gain more systematic routes into Canadian universities, organisations and communities, and those exchanges could reach well beyond conventional higher education. Canadian expertise in Arctic communities, Indigenous knowledge and reconciliation, multilingual federalism, AI, rural and remote education, climate adaptation and natural-resource governance would create very different possibilities for European universities, organisations and vocational institutions. For civil society, the implications are particularly interesting. Erasmus+ funds participation, organisational partnerships, training and capacity development as well as student mobility. A fully associated Canada would not simply mean more Canadian undergraduates spending a semester in Barcelona. It could mean r
