CANADA IN A MULTIPOLAR WORLD
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Energy giant Canada has emerged as the leading driver of efforts to build a formal middle-power coalition among like-minded Commonwealth nations, with Prime Minister Mark Carney using his first year in office to push the long-dormant CANZUK concept and a broader variable-geometry foreign policy doctrine as the US ramps up efforts to weaken the Canadian economy.
Carney's January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, titled "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada's Path", declared that the international order had suffered "a rupture, not a transition" and called on middle powers to cooperate rather than accept subordination to great powers. His line that "middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu" has since been repeated by advocates of closer ties between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
The shocking speech drew an unusual standing ovation at Davos and was followed by a sharp response from US President Donald Trump, who rescinded an invitation for Canada to join his Board of Peace and threatened 100% tariffs on Ottawa unless it abandoned a planned trade deal with China.
Canada has since followed up with concrete diplomatic activity. Carney has completed a week-long mission to India, Australia and Japan and has hosted 18 nations in Montreal to define the governance of a proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, modelled on the World Bank but aimed at mobilising private capital for collective security among like-minded partners.
Canada has become the first non-European country to join the European Union's Security Action for Europe programme. Joint exercises with South Korea, Japan, Australia and the Philippines have been stepped up, alongside closer defence cooperation with the UK and Nordic states.
The harder edge of Carney's foreign policy has been backed by a defence spending commitment to hit NATO's 2% of GDP target this year and reach 5% by 2035, marking the largest Canadian strategic reset since the early Cold War. Major procurement programmes under consideration include 12 submarines from South Korea's Hanwha Ocean or Germany's ThyssenKrupp, 88 fighter jets, Australian-supplied over-the-horizon radar and 15 Canadian-built destroyers.
The CANZUK proposal fits into this wider architecture. Advocates argue the four countries share Westminster parliamentary systems, common-law traditions and King Charles III as head of state, providing a natural basis for deeper trade, mobility and security ties. Australia and New Zealand already operate something close to the proposed arrangement, with free movement, work rights, healthcare access and domestic university fees for each other's citizens.
A full CANZUK framework would extend this to the UK and Canada, removing tariffs, recognising professional qualifications and allowing engineers, doctors, teachers and lawyers to practice across the four countries without additional accreditation. The combined population would reach around 135mn, with significant natural resource endowments concentrated in Australia and Canada.
Support for the CANZUK proposal has come from Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and former UK Cabinet minister Tom Tugendhat, who argued that the geographic separation of the four countries would be an advantage rather than a constraint. The Australian Institute of International Affairs has proposed a plurilateral agreement among the four countries modelled on the dormant Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
Not all reaction has been positive. The Council on Foreign Relations has argued that a formal middle power club would make the world more dangerous by accelerating the break-up of the liberal international order. Analysts have also noted that Carney's own outreach to China, including a "canola for electric vehicles" deal, risks undermining coalition discipline.
Carney has committed to both a foreign policy review and a national security strategy built around what he has called "values-based realism" in a world of "variable geometry", meaning different coalitions for different issues. However, Global Affairs Canada is facing a 20% budget cut, from CAD9.05bn ($6.46bn) in 2025-26 to CAD7.22bn ($5.15bn) in 2026-27, prompting criticism from former diplomats who argue the department is being hollowed out just as Canada's international ambitions expand.
Australia and the UK remain comparatively cautious, with analysts describing current governments in Canberra and London as preferring to ride out global conditions rather than reshape them. Canada's role as the driver of the agenda reflects both the acute pressure Ottawa faces from the Trump administration, which has imposed sectoral tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminium and lumber, and Carney's personal track record as a former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor with extensive networks in London.
Could Canada Join The EU? Geography, Law, And The Prospects Of Membership – Analysis
April 18, 2026
By Geopolitical Monitor
By Matteo Vecchi
The current historical and geopolitical context obliges us to reconsider the supposed status quo, thus requiring a more collective and courageous interpretation – and, crucially, implementation – of the European Union project.
The Union’s territorial configuration already extends far beyond the boundaries that commonly structure our political imagination and our mental maps: even a cursory look at Netherlands and French overseas territories shows how the EU’s reach already leans into the Pacific and other extra-European regions. In this scenario, the Union lives today in a “beyond the map” dimension that destabilizes any purely continental account of what counts as “Europe.” What it is important to consider, first and foremost, is the relationship between geography and law. The definition of territories, the impact law has upon them, and, conversely, the constraints that territorial facts impose on legal choices are issues that arise independently of – and in many respects prior to – any geopolitical analysis. When the Union determines who can become a member state, it does not simply draw lines on a map; it makes an interpretive choice about what should be treated, today, as “Europe.”
At the time of drafting this contribution, the European Union also appears, in several respects, reinvigorated. On the one hand, the most recent elections in Hungary seem to reopen spaces for recomposing the tensions between integration and democratic backsliding. On the other, a renewed – albeit still embryonic – debate has emerged in the United Kingdom on the possibility of a return to the European family. Taken together, these developments suggest that the Union is not a static construction but a political-legal organism capable of renegotiating, over time, both its territorial reach and its normative self-understanding.
The EU treaties set substantive conditions for accession but leave the notion of “Europe” and the Union’s ultimate geographical reach remarkably open-textured, which makes it conceptually possible to imagine Canada as a future member state. It is precisely this deliberate openness that allows the Union to grow and prosper by facing up to what it already is – a community of law founded on shared values – and to what it might become, should it push to their logical conclusion forms of membership grounded less in territorial contiguity and more in constitutional, economic, and value-based convergence.
Legal Premises: What Is a “European State”?
Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) provides that “any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union.”
This provision lays down the basic checkmarks for accession – statehood, “European” character, and compliance with the Union’s values – but it does not itself codify any precise geographical boundary of Europe. As historians and geographers have long observed, Europe’s borders are the contingent outcome of intellectual, political, and military decisions rather than the expression of a self-evident natural frontier, which makes it difficult to say in strictly legal terms where Europe “ends.”
Of course, public international law offers a more stable conceptual starting point in the classical definition of the state codified in Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention: a state is an entity possessing a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states. The European Union, as J. Odermatt and others have noted, is a highly developed international organization of integration but not itself a state in the Montevideo sense. If we combine this neutral conception of statehood with the open-textured reference in Article 49 TEU to “any European State,” it becomes apparent that the legal category of potential members is not strictly determined by geography alone but is mediated by political and value-based assessments.
Alongside this formal, geography-related dimension, it is useful to foreground two additional markers that increasingly structure debates on the Union’s external identity: shared customs and shared languages. It is hardly accidental that French remains one of the EU’s principals working languages and that English, despite Brexit, continues to function as the de facto lingua franca of the Union’s institutions and public sphere. Nor is it coincidental that Canada, as a bilingual federation with deep-rooted French and English linguistic communities and liberal-democratic institutions, exhibits a way of life and constitutional culture that often overlaps with, rather than merely resembles, that of many EU member states.
Canada and the EU: From Privileged Partner to “Possible” Candidate?
The idea of Canada’s potential accession to the EU is not entirely novel; in recent years, scholars and commentators such as Frédéric Mérand and other authors working on Canada–EU relations have explicitly teased the prospect of Canadian EU membership as a long-term strategic option. These interventions underline that, although formal negotiations are not currently foreseen, the question “could Canada join?” has shifted from the realm of pure fantasy to that of speculative but serious legal and political debate. In this sense, the discussion about Canadian accession mirrors broader reflections on the elasticity of Article 49 TEU and on the extent to which “European” can be interpreted in cultural, political, or even functional terms rather than as a strictly continental label.
This debate must be situated against the background of a dense and constantly evolving web of bilateral agreements between Canada and the EU, among which the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)occupies a central place. Signed in 2016 and provisionally applied since 2017, CETA removes customs duties on the vast majority of goods, opens public procurement markets on both sides, facilitates trade in services and investment, and includes ambitious provisions on labor rights and environmental protection. As the EU’s own explanatory materials emphasize, CETA is designed not merely as a trade liberalization instrument but as a framework that aligns regulatory standards and promotes a model of economic globalization constrained by social and environmental safeguards.
The depth and breadth of this agreement mean that Canada already participates in aspects of the Union’s economic and regulatory space that, for many other partners, are only accessible through membership. Provisions on mutual recognition of professional qualifications, non-discrimination of investors, and extensive market access have brought Canadian and EU legal orders into an unusually high degree of interdependence, even though Canada remains formally a “third country” in the current geopolitical context, marked by democratic backsliding in various regions and by increasing contestation of multilateral norms, this close association can be considered as part of a broader attempt to consolidate a transatlantic area grounded in democracy, the rule of law, and robust welfare and environmental standards.
From this perspective, the existing treaty architecture between Canada and the EU may be viewed as an intermediate stage along a continuum of integration rather than as a definitive ceiling. Article 49 TEU, interpreted in conjunction with the Copenhagen criteria, already requires that candidate states display stable democratic institutions, a functioning market economy, and the ability to take on the obligations of membership – conditions that Canada, as a mature liberal democracy and advanced economy, would have little difficulty satisfying on paper.
If the Union and its member states were prepared to construe the notion of a “European State” in a functional and value-oriented fashion privileging constitutional affinity, dense economic integration, and shared public-law commitments over strict territorial contiguity, there is nothing in primary law that would make a Canadian application inconceivable as a matter of principle.
In this light, Canada’s candidacy would test, and potentially expand, the outer limits of the Union’s self-understanding as a regional organization that aspires to be a global normative power. It would force EU institutions and member states to clarify whether “Europe” in Article 49 TEU denotes a physical place, a historical-civilizational project, or a constitutional space bound together by common values and legal commitments – and whether, in an era of democratic backsliding and geopolitical realignment, that space might legitimately include a North American democracy that already shares in practice a significant portion of the Union’s rules.
Geopoliticalmonitor.com is an open-source intelligence collection and forecasting service, providing research, analysis and up to date coverage on situations and events that have a substantive impact on political, military and economic affairs.
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