A structured, transparent framework for ‘associate membership’ can give CEE and its neighbours a concrete pathway for market access, research, and industrial cooperation without weakening EU standards.
Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal to make Canada the EU’s first ‘associate member’ made headlines around the world, although nobody in Brussels seemed able to explain what the term meant. Yet the proposal deserves more than ridicule. Properly defined, it could become a useful addition to European foreign policy. What it lacks is a strategy, clear rules and criteria that apply beyond Canada.
On September 16, the Commission president told MEPs that she wanted to “work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU”. The applause came before anyone could answer the obvious question: no such status exists in the treaties.
An EU diplomat told Reuters that “nobody really knows what it means” and warned that von der Leyen was overpromising. The proposal had not been discussed with member states beforehand. Article 217 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which allows the EU to conclude association agreements with third countries, was later mentioned in Brussels as a possible legal basis. So far, there is no indication that treaty change would be required. EU leaders are expected to discuss the idea at the October European Council.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola subsequently suggested that other countries might eventually follow Canada, mentioning Australia and New Zealand. Mark Carney told the European Parliament that Canada was not seeking full membership and later argued that the substance of the relationship mattered more than its label.
Donald Trump called the idea “laughable” and warned that, if he regarded it as a hostile act, he would impose “very serious tariffs”. That reaction may help explain some of the proposal’s political appeal in Brussels.
For now, however, an announcement without an agreed legal form or political purpose remains an idea rather than a policy.
The countries already waiting
The more difficult question is the message this sends to countries that have spent years, and in some cases decades, dealing with the EU’s existing accession process.
Türkiye has been a candidate since 1999, with accession negotiations effectively at a standstill since 2018. North Macedonia has held candidate status since 2005, Montenegro since 2010, Serbia since 2012 and Albania since 2014. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova and Ukraine joined the list in 2022, and Georgia in 2023, although the Georgian government has since suspended the process until 2028. Kosovo submitted its application in December 2022. Armenia has also signalled that it intends to apply.
Others have already discovered where the formal limits lie. Morocco applied to join the European Communities in July 1987 and was rejected because it was not considered a European state.
None of them had been consulted about the new category now being floated for Canada. In Warsaw, where the Europe Agreement signed in December 1991 is still remembered as the start of a 13-year road to membership, that contrast is hard to miss.
Enlargement has arguably been the EU’s most effective foreign-policy tool, and its credibility rests not only on the prospect of eventual membership, but on the assumption that the conditions are transparent and broadly the same from one applicant to the next.
Europe is an adjective
Even so, the instinct behind the Canadian proposal is worth taking seriously. The objection that Canada is “not in Europe” is less decisive than it sounds.
In Europe’s political institutions, ‘European’ has never been a purely geographical category. Even the phrase that excluded Morocco from membership is more complicated than a line on a map. European Parliament research has noted that the term ‘European State’ in Article 49 has political and cultural dimensions as well as geographical ones, with Türkiye being the obvious example.
The Council of Europe includes Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Canada, meanwhile, has held observer status there since 1996.
Nor is the European Union itself territorially confined to the European continent. Cyprus lies in the eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of western Asia. French Guiana is an integral part of the EU and its single market despite being in South America. The same is true of Réunion and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Greenland, geographically part of North America, left the European Communities in 1985 but remains linked to the EU as an overseas country and territory. Von der Leyen opened an EU office in Nuuk in March 2024.
None of this makes Canada eligible for full membership. Article 49 reserves that possibility for European states.
But association is different. Article 217 contains no comparable geographical restriction.
If EU law and the single market can operate in Cayenne or Saint-Denis, distance from Brussels is plainly not, by itself, an obstacle to deep integration with the Union. The useful question is therefore not whether Ottawa can somehow be declared European, but how far a non-European democracy can be integrated with European institutions without becoming a member state.
That is where von der Leyen’s idea becomes interesting.
What should association be for?
The harder question is what the EU actually wants enlargement and association to do.
Deepening relations with wealthy, stable democracies such as Canada is relatively straightforward. The politically harder work lies closer to the Union’s borders, where enlargement has strategic consequences for security, economic development and the balance of power in Europe.
The first issue is speed. The Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova have spent years meeting EU conditions while the Union debates its own ability to absorb new members. If Armenia submits a formal application, it should receive a substantive response within months, not disappear into a process lasting another decade.
The EU also needs a credible framework for countries that are unlikely to become members but with which it wants much deeper political and economic integration.
Uzbekistan offers one example of why this matters. The most populous country in Central Asia has an Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with the EU, provisionally applied since March, as well as a strategic partnership on critical raw materials. Morocco has been formally associated with the European project since 1969 and has held “advanced status” in its relations with the EU since 2008. Tunisia has had a “privileged partnership” since 2012.
These are floors, not ceilings.
A more ambitious association framework could include sectoral access to the single market in return for regulatory alignment, participation in Horizon Europe, broader participation in Erasmus+, easier visa arrangements for students, researchers and entrepreneurs, and joint industrial projects. In countries rich in critical raw materials, that could also mean investment in processing and value chains rather than treating those countries merely as suppliers.
Such an offer would give the EU something more substantial to put on the table than the migration-heavy deals that have come to dominate much of its policy towards the southern neighbourhood.
If “associate membership” acquires a clear legal meaning and is made available according to transparent criteria, it could become a genuinely useful new layer of European integration, somewhere between ordinary partnership and full membership.
Without those rules, the Canadian initiative risks sending a very different message: that some countries spend decades navigating the EU’s procedures while others can be offered a new category before anyone has decided what it means.
Europe is an adjective. The Union should decide more carefully what it wants that adjective to describe.
Photo: Dreamstime.