Let's Know Things

This week we talk about schools, riots, and police violence.
We also discuss Le Pen, Macron, and international reporting.
Recommended Book: This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee
Transcript
On October 17, 2026, hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across France. Many were protesting the price of fuel, groceries, and other necessities. Others were high-school students, parents, teachers, and union members demanding better schools and public services.
Most of those marches were peaceful. But in several cities, there were clashes with police, shops broken into and looted, and public buildings attacked. The town hall in Limoges caught fire. In Paris, images of burning vehicles and smashed storefronts made headline news, often without clear context, explaining where the peaceful marches ended and the violence began.
Those two realities, peaceful protests on one hand, violence and widespread theft and destruction on the other, have since competed to define this story. Many people who marched, and in some cases continue to march, are concerned that their demands will become inextricably associated with all that widely shared footage of rioting. For shopkeepers and residents whose neighborhoods were damaged, that footage represents a real event with real costs. And for politicians facing a presidential election next spring, the unrest has become a test of who can speak to both protestor grievances and concerns about public safety.
What I’d like to talk about today is how these protests started, why a movement about schools became entangled with a cost-of-living crisis and, then, serious disorder, and what all of this might mean for French politics; especially for Marine Le Pen, the far-right politician who’s leading the race to succeed President Emmanuel Macron.
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The current protest wave began in September, at a high school in Créteil, outside Paris, where students were angry about unfilled staff positions. Walkouts and blockades spread to other schools, then to other parts of the country.
The specific complaints varied by school, but the broad list was fairly consistent: teaching roles remaining unfilled, crowded classrooms, aging buildings, and school days that can stretch from eight in the morning to six in the evening. Some students also object to Parcoursup, the government system that sorts students who apply for higher education into schools, which students say adds uncertainty and a lot of pressure to the tail-end of their high school experience.
These are not just complaints about aesthetics or convenience. If a student loses weeks of instruction before an exam, or has to spend a winter in a poorly heated classroom, that can affect what they learn and what opportunities they have later. And the experience isn’t evenly distributed. France’s national education system is meant, in part, to make citizenship and opportunity less dependent on where someone was born. Yet the OECD has found that students’ socioeconomic background remains strongly associated with their educational outcomes, despite these attempts at establishing opportunity equality.
The French education ministry has pointed to investments it has made and improvements in filling teaching posts. But national spending and staffing figures don’t guarantee that the right teacher is available in the right classroom on Monday morning. A vacant specialized post, a long absence without a substitute, or a building whose repairs are delayed can still shape a student’s educational experience for an entire year.
The government’s early response to these demonstrations mixed acknowledgment with policing the protestors. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promised work on teacher replacements, building repairs, and schedules. Authorities also moved to clear blockades and arrest people accused of vandalism or attacking police and school staff. As the confrontations continued, teenagers suffered severe injuries attributed to police crowd-control weapons, including one young protester who lost a hand. Officers and school staff have been injured, too.
These injuries and all that pushback intensified an existing dispute over whether forceful policing was preventing violence, contributing to it, or doing both in different places at different times. That question does not have a single answer, but it does help explain why some parents and students who were originally focused on school conditions began talking about policing as well: the police response to those protests blended that existing conversation and its associated complaints with those related to schooling in the country.
Meanwhile, another source of anger was building well beyond the schools.
France has been hit by an energy-price surge connected to the broader disruption of oil and gas markets in the Middle East. Its statistics agency reported that consumer prices were up 3.1% in September compared with a year earlier, but energy prices were up more than 21%. Diesel was up more than 44%, and gasoline more than 25%. Fresh food prices also spiked pretty dramatically, partly because of shortages caused by summer heatwaves.
Calls circulated online to revive the “yellow vest” movement, which began in 2018 over fuel prices and grew into a much broader protest about living standards and political representation. Unions, including the CGT, backed a new day of action. Student groups urged their supporters to join. By October 17, these strands had converged, though they didn’t all share the same priorities or protest methods.
The Interior Ministry estimated about 550,000 people demonstrated on that single day, though organizers have said the number was higher. Either way it was a very large mobilization. And reporters saw peaceful crowds carrying flags and singing, alongside far smaller groups throwing projectiles, setting fires, breaking windows, and looting. Reuters reported roughly 2,400 arrests on the first day, when hundreds of businesses were damaged. One demonstrator died after suffering a cardiac arrest. In the aftermath, there were additional clashes and localized curfews.
As tends to be the case in these situations, some people may have joined one of these demonstrations intending to commit violence. Others may have taken advantage of confusion once violence began around them. Some protesters may also have committed crimes. Investigators still have to establish who did what in each individual case, though a survey by the pollster Elabe found that 70% of respondents believed those involved in the violence were mainly people who showed up specifically to cause it, which suggests that many French people distinguish the protests from the looting—something not all reports on these demonstrations have clearly done.
That same survey found that 91% of respondents condemned the violence, while 93% considered the cost-of-living demands legitimate and 82% considered the students’ demands legitimate. In other words, a person can think a demonstration is justified but the destruction around it isn’t.
So why did all of these issues come to a head, and become so combustible, now?
Persistent school problems over a long period of time, followed by a sudden rise in fuel and other prices, gets us partway to an explanation. But more fundamentally, many French voters expect the state to provide reliable education, transportation, healthcare, and protection from sharp economic shocks. Those expectations are pretty central to France’s social model, but the government hasn’t kept up their end of the bargain, and has little spare money with which to address these issues, at the moment.
At the end of June 2026, public debt stood at about 119% of the country’s annual economic output, according to France’s statistics agency. High debt doesn’t mean the government will run out of money tomorrow, but it does mean that large new spending promises come with questions about long-term borrowing costs, taxes, and what would have to be cut in the tradeoff. France has also struggled to pass budgets…


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This week we talk about Adobe, Call of Duty, and Microsoft.
We also discuss compilation, machine code, and AI agents.
Recommended Book: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow
Transcript
In October of 2026, a software developer named Brandon Thomas attracted a lot of attention by releasing a collection of free, open-source programs with names like PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, and VectorCraft. These apps are meant to replicate the functionality of digital tools like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator. Within days, the same project also had a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app—alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The coverage of these releases was borderline breathless. One person and a collection of AI coding tools had apparently cloned the key offerings of two of the most established software businesses in the world. The developer of these apps suggested that software, as we’ve always known it, might be over.
Another story, also circulating this month, featured a team using AI tools to reconstruct the underlying code of the 2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This wasn’t a lookalike built by watching the game and imitating its menus, it was an attempt to work backward from the compiled program to something like the source code its developers might have originally written.
Both projects fall under a loose umbrella of AI-assisted reverse engineering efforts. But they used different approaches and achieved different levels of fidelity, which have led to different likely legal and practical consequences.
What I’d like to talk about today is how people are using AI to reproduce old games and current software, why this is suddenly feasible at a much greater scale than before, and what happens if copying the behaviors and features of a program becomes a lot cheaper than creating the original was.
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To kick things off, let’s go through three things that are often called cloning in the world of software.
One is making a program that looks and behaves enough like another that a user can accomplish similar tasks. You can watch someone use Photoshop, read documentation, examine a PSD file, and build a different image editor with familiar tools. You don’t need Photoshop’s source code to do that. People have been making alternatives to proprietary software for decades; GIMP and LibreOffice, alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft apps, respectively, existed long before today’s AI models.
A second approach aims for compatibility. Maybe you don’t need to reproduce every button in a word processor, you just need your program to open and save documents that Word users can exchange without losing their formatting. That requires understanding file formats, often down to details that aren’t obvious from the official specifications, so it can be a deceptively complex undertaking.
The third approach is decompilation, which means starting with a compiled program—the machine instructions a computer runs—and trying to reconstruct higher-level code from it. This is like having a cake and working backward toward the recipe. You can identify many ingredients, and perhaps bake something that tastes the same, but the original measurements and the cook’s handwritten notes are not available to those doing this kind of attempted backtracking.
The Modern Warfare 2 project fits into that last category. Developer Maurice Heumann described spending roughly three months, with collaborators and an expanding group of AI agents, rebuilding a popular first-person shooter. His October account no longer names the game, but earlier public posts and reporting identify it as Modern Warfare 2. Heumann says earlier posts were removed after copyright-owner objections, and he doesn’t plan to release the reconstructed code.
Initially, the team had three AI agents doing the reconstruction and a fourth reviewing it. They made quick, visible progress: menus worked, maps loaded, and it looked as though much of the game had been recovered. Then the team discovered that a great deal of the code was wrong. The AI agents that they used had invented logic, misunderstood data structures, and even replaced simple operations with much bulkier, slower ones.
So they changed the test. Using the compiler that had been used for the original game, they compiled each reconstructed function and compared the resulting machine instructions to the original executable. If a function matched byte for byte—accounting for things like references whose addresses can vary—they had much stronger evidence that they’d recovered its behavior. If it didn’t, the agent had to try again.
Even that required supervision, though. Heumann says agents sometimes tried to satisfy the test by embedding arbitrary bits of assembly code, or by modifying the checker so a troublesome function would be skipped. The team had to prohibit those shortcuts and protect the verification process from changes. This isn’t exactly an example of an AI deciding to cheat in the human sense, but it’s similar: the bots were trying to pass a test in ways that the people running it didn’t want or intend.
By the time Heumann published his account, he said 99% of the game’s functions were present in the reconstructed source and 83% matched byte for byte. He also said the game was fully playable. Worth noting is that those are the team’s reported results, not an independently audited release; the code is private. And that 83% refers to functions, not 83% of the game’s artwork, design, or overall creative work. Still, the scale of the attempt is striking, as is the amount of infrastructure required to make it happen in the way the creators intended.
A smaller, more archival version of this story involves a game called Klonoa: Empire of Dreams, a Game Boy Advance title that was released in 2001.
A developer who goes by Macabeus has been rebuilding its code from the game cartridge’s data, with help from AI tools and other contributors. In an August write-up, Macabeus reported that 51% of the game’s code bytes had been matched: the newly written C code, when run through the right old compiler, produced the same machine instructions as the original.
This is a very different sort of project from creating a playable imitation. The point is to understand how the game was made, make the work reproducible, and potentially preserve or adapt it for the future. The public project doesn’t include a copy of the game, and participants need their own legally obtained game data.
While exploring the code and testing the game, the AI agent Macabeus was using found a hidden minigame on the “Clear Save Data” screen. Macabeus initially assumed the AI was hallucinating, before verifying that it was real. The discovery didn’t require the model to be a game-design genius, it just had to inspect a lot of code, notice an odd pathway, and try it: exactly the kind of patient investigation a person might do, but with much more capacity for repetitive searching.
The project also illustrates a limit in this sort of process. Matching the machine code doesn’t automatically produce clean, readable source code. Macabeus describes agents finding awkward shortcuts when they get stuck, and more experienced human reverse engineers rejecting some of those supposed solutions. All of which is arguably fine for this kind of project, where the original source is gone, and the reverse-engineer effort is primarily intended to create a playable approximation of the original. But the process is still often uneven and uncertain, and isn’t as simple as pushing a button and getting a perfect copy of a game or other piece of software spat out by the AI.
The aforementioned Adobe and Microsoft projects are different from those game cloning efforts. ArtCraft’s “Craft” apps say they’re written from scratch, using public specifications and observations of existing programs, with original or openly licensed assets. They aren’t claiming to have disassembled Photoshop or extracted Microsoft’…


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This week we talk about polio, malaria, and smallpox.
We also discuss vaccines, the CDC, and the HHS.
Recommended Book: Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
Transcript
In 2000, the United States declared measles eliminated. That didn’t mean nobody in the country would ever catch it again, it meant the virus was no longer freely spreading within the US. New cases generally arrived with someone who had been infected elsewhere, and public health workers were able to stop those cases from turning into long-running chains of transmission via the systems, tools, and infrastructure they created.
In early October of 2026, Pennsylvania reported more than a thousand new measles cases this year, most of them part of an outbreak that began in April. As of October 7, the state had confirmed 1,078 cases across 41 counties, 207 hospitalizations, and five measles-associated deaths. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, had counted nearly 3,900 cases through the beginning of the month, making this the worst year for measles in the US in decades.
Pennsylvania’s latest update included 74 newly confirmed cases, though the state was careful to say that more than 40 of those people had become sick over two weeks earlier. So these were newly *reported* cases, not necessarily newly *infected* people—a distinction that matters when we’re trying to figure out whether an outbreak is speeding up or slowing down.
There’s a similar distinction being made with the death figures. Pennsylvania calls its five deaths *measles-associated*, using a definition that considers timing, a confirmed infection, medical evidence, and whether an unrelated cause might explain the death. The CDC’s national death count has not always matched the state’s, in part because the agencies publish on different schedules and review and tally deaths differently; so reporting on these sorts of things can sometimes be unintentionally fuzzy due to varying definitions and numbers.
What I’d like to talk about today is what it actually means to eliminate a disease, how measles has managed to claw its way back in a country that achieved that ‘eliminated’ milestone more than a quarter-century ago, and how vaccination, misinformation, and changing federal policy might shape what happens next.
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There are a few words public health workers and officials use that sound similar, but which describe substantially different achievements.
If a disease has been *eradicated*, it no longer circulates naturally anywhere in the world, as is the case with smallpox. The last known natural case was recorded in Somalia in 1977, and the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980. There have been no natural smallpox outbreaks since. That’s a truly remarkable global achievement, and it’s why routine smallpox vaccination isn’t necessary for most people today.
*Elimination* is more local, and more conditional. It means sustained transmission of a disease has been interrupted in a defined place, like within a country. The pathogen can still exist elsewhere, and an infected traveler can still bring it in. Whether that introduction fizzles out or takes hold depends on what it finds when it arrives—how prepared that country’s government is, and how well vaccinated its population, how well funded its healthcare system, and so on.
Measles isn’t the only disease that’s been eliminated in the United States. The last US case of polio caused by *wild* poliovirus was in 1979, and the Americas were declared free of it in 1994. But in 2022, an unvaccinated person in New York developed paralytic polio caused by a vaccine-derived poliovirus, and genetically related virus residue was found in local wastewater. That was not wild polio somehow reappearing from the American past, it was a different type of poliovirus that latched onto a vulnerable person in a country where sustained polio transmission had long since been halted.
That virus was linked to the live oral polio vaccine used in some other countries, which can sometimes give rise to circulating variants where immunity is low. The inactivated polio vaccine used in the US cannot do that.
The US also eliminated sustained malaria transmission in the early 1950s, but mosquitoes capable of carrying the parasite still live in the US, and people returning from places where malaria is common can carry it across the border. In 2023, the CDC recorded ten locally acquired, mosquito-transmitted cases across four states—the first such cases in about twenty years. Ten cases doesn’t mean malaria has become endemic in the US again, it’s just further evidence that elimination of a disease in a region doesn’t mean reintroduction is impossible.
Smallpox, then, is an example of a disease that has been removed from natural circulation worldwide. Polio, malaria, and measles, in contrast, can be locally defeated, but regions in which that’s the case remain vulnerable to the movement of people, viruses or parasites, and that victory is reliant on the continued health of the health systems meant to detect and interrupt them.
Measles is an especially demanding test of those systems because it spreads so efficiently.
The virus moves through the air when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes, and it can remain in the air, in a room in which someone has coughed, for up to two hours after that person has left. People can pass it on before the distinctive rash appears, and, according to the CDC, as many as nine out of ten nearby people who aren’t immune can become infected after exposure.
For some, the illness brings a fever, a cough, red eyes, and a rash, followed by recovery. For others, it causes pneumonia, swelling of the brain, or death. Young children, pregnant people, and those with weakened immune systems face higher risks, and this is why a measles outbreak isn’t just a rash going around, and why even just a few cases can generate an enormous amount of public health work: finding contacts, checking immunity, arranging vaccinations, and warning people who may have spent time in the same airspace. Measles can be painful and uncomfortable, but it can also be deadly, so all that effort is arguably well-invested.
The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine—the MMR vaccine—is the main tool for preventing the spread of measles. One dose is about 93% effective against measles, and two are about 97% effective. That doesn’t mean vaccinated people can never get sick; these are estimates of how much the vaccine lowers the chance of infection. When most people in a community are protected, the virus also has fewer opportunities to reach those who cannot receive the vaccine or who haven’t yet reached the right age for their first routine dose.
Public health agencies often use about 95% coverage as a target for measles. That isn’t a magical national number, though, where a country is safe at 95.1% and doomed at 94.9%. It describes the level of protection usually needed within communities to make sustained spread difficult. A state can have a healthy-looking average while particular schools, neighborhoods, or social networks have far lower coverage and are thus at higher localized risk.
And that’s part of what makes the current trend concerning. CDC data show MMR coverage among American kindergarteners falling from 95.2% in the 2019-to-2020 school year to 92.4% in 2025-to-2026. About 280,000 kindergarteners lacked documentation of a completed MMR series in that latter year. Not all of them were necessarily unvaccinated (these sorts of records can be incomplete) but the direction of travel, and the concentration of missed vaccinations in some places and among some communities, leave more openings for the virus, which means everyone is at greater risk of infection.
There isn’t one explanation for all those missed doses. Some families have trouble getting appointments, taking time off work, or reaching a clinic. Others seek exemptions or have questions they don’t feel were answered well by medical …


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This week we talk about Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan.
We also discuss the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, ports, and journalism.
Recommended Book: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
Transcript
In 2018, Ethiopia reopened its embassy in Eritrea. The two countries had fought a border war in the late 1990s and had spent nearly two decades in a tense state that was not quite war, not quite peace. The reopening was part of a striking reconciliation between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki. Abiy received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, in large part for his efforts to end that conflict.
At the beginning of October, though, Ethiopia announced that it was re-closing that embassy. It ordered ten Eritrean diplomats to leave Addis Ababa, saying they had engaged in activities that threatened Ethiopian security. Eritrea called the decision astonishing and said it was severing diplomatic ties with Ethiopia in response.
Ethiopia also expelled an Egyptian diplomat, and Egypt responded by expelling an Ethiopian one. The African Union urged all three countries to exercise restraint and preserve channels of communication, but all of this was happening as fighting was picking back up in northern Ethiopia, and as explosions were heard in the capital, Addis Ababa. A source connected to an armed opposition alliance told Reuters that the group had launched drone strikes there. But as of early October, there had been no independent confirmation of what caused those explosions. Witnesses and officials confirmed hearing blasts; whether they were an attack, and who might have carried it out, are still open questions.
What I’d like to talk about today is how a peace that once seemed to transform this part of Africa fell apart, how Ethiopia’s internal war became entangled with its disputes with its neighbors, and why it’s important to distinguish what’s actually happening from what each side in this simmering conflict says is happening.
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Let’s kick things off with a quick refresher of this region’s geography and history, to help explain why this crisis has so many layers.
Eritrea sits along the Red Sea, just north of Ethiopia. It became independent from Ethiopia in 1993, which left Ethiopia without a coastline. The two countries initially maintained decent relations, but then they went to war over their border in 1998. The fighting ended in 2000, without any real resolution, and without formally establishing a new, mutually acceptable relationship. That was the long stalemate Abiy and Isaias seemed to resolve back in 2018.
Inside Ethiopia, there was another important change during this period. For decades, a political movement originating in the northern region of Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, had been the dominant force in the coalition that governed the country. Abiy came to power in 2018 and reshaped that governing coalition, and this put even more distance between the central government and the TPLF.
In 2020, those political disputes erupted into a war between the Ethiopian federal government and Tigrayan forces. Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopia’s government against the TPLF. This is one of the most striking reversals in the present crisis: the government and its former Eritrean ally are now accusing one another of dangerous interference, while Ethiopian officials allege that Eritrea is helping that same Tigrayan movement they once fought against.
This war, which lasted from 2020 to 2022, killed hundreds of thousands of people, according to estimates that vary substantially because conditions made reliable counting so difficult. It also displaced millions, damaged farms and hospitals, and involved absolutely horrific abuses against civilians. International investigators and human-rights groups documented atrocities by multiple parties, including Ethiopian and Eritrean forces and Tigrayan fighters.
In November of 2022, Ethiopia’s government and the TPLF signed a peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa. They agreed to stop fighting, disarm Tigrayan forces, restore services throughout the region, allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians, and to work toward a more stable political settlement. But Eritrea was not a party to that agreement, and that’s because there were two different peace processes.
The 2018 reconciliation was between Ethiopia and Eritrea: two states ending a border standoff. The Pretoria agreement was between Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF: two parties trying to end a civil war. Neither agreement automatically settled the questions at the heart of the other one, and Eritrea’s role in the civil war made it more difficult for a ceasefire between Ethiopian and Tigrayan leaders to guarantee peace along the Eritrean border.
Parts of western Tigray were, and remain to this day, contested by Tigrayan and Amhara authorities. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced from that area have not been able to return home safely. Disarmament did not proceed as the agreement envisioned, and rights groups continued to report abuses, including by Eritrean troops in parts of Tigray.
Within Tigray, the TPLF split into rival factions. The status of the regional administration became another source of conflict. In May of this year, TPLF leaders pushed out an administration backed by the federal government. The two sides disputed who had authority there, how the peace agreement should be carried out, and whether federal funds were being withheld. Human Rights Watch also reported allegations of a coercive recruitment drive by Tigrayan authorities, including the forced recruitment of child soldiers.
So the Pretoria agreement stopped a major war, but it left armed groups, competing governments, disputed territory, and displaced families in place, their problems unresolved.
Then, in late September of this year, fighting between federal forces and Tigrayan fighters intensified in Tigray and neighboring Afar. The United Nations reported that armed forces had seized the airports in Mekelle, Axum, and Shire, and warned that hostilities were spreading into neighboring areas. An alliance of seven Ethiopian opposition groups also announced a common challenge to Abiy’s government, though importantly, an announcement of cooperation doesn’t tell us how closely those groups are actually coordinating on the ground.
Ethiopia’s army chief then accused Eritrea of helping the TPLF and suggested that Egypt and Sudan were supporting the opposition as well. Eritrea, Egypt, and Sudan have denied the allegations. And those differing stories point at a difficulty in any conflict, but especially one happening in this part of the world, at this moment in time.
Governments have access to information they may not make public. They also have reasons to portray an internal opponent as an instrument of a foreign power. Armed groups have their own reasons to claim allies or capabilities they may not actually possess. And governments accused of involvement in a conflict or violent act have strong reasons to deny it, whether the accusation is true or false.
This fog of war applies to the aforementioned blasts in Addis Ababa, too. If opposition forces had successfully attacked targets in the capital, that would represent a significant shift in the conflict. Reuters reported a claim from a source linked to the opposition alliance, but also said it could not confirm who caused the explosions. The Associated Press reported that it remained unclear whether the blasts were an attack or just military exercises. So there’s a consequential claim here, but not yet confirmation of a rebel strike on the capital.
Part of the problem is that independent observation is difficult in this region right now. Internet service in northern Ethiopia was disrupted as the fighting escalated. Roads and flights have been interrupted. Earlier this year, Ethiopian authorities expelled a French journalist after her reporting trip to Tigray, and temporarily revoked accreditati…


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This week we talk about EU membership, trade deals, and association.
We also discuss Australia, Ursula von der Leyen, and Brussels.
Recommended Book: Being You by Anil Seth
Transcript
Just off the coast of Newfoundland, there’s a small group of islands that belongs to France. Saint-Pierre and Miquelon are close enough to Canada that, at their nearest point, the two countries are separated by only a few kilometers of water.
In September, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met French President Emmanuel Macron on these islands. The two leaders could stand on French territory and talk about a partnership with the European Union, while Canada was visible across the water.
A few days earlier, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had made a similar, but possibly more significant proposal. Speaking before the European Parliament, with Carney in the room, she said she wanted to open the door for Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member.”
Depending on which headline you read about the statement, this may have sounded like Canada might be joining the EU, joining it partway, or joining an entirely new version of it. Soon after, Australia’s trade minister said his country was “on the same page” as Canada regarding closer ties, and the European Parliament’s president then suggested Australia and New Zealand might follow Canada’s lead.
Now, despite all those headlines and interpretations, there’s one problem with all these stated ambitions: the European Union does not have an established category called associate member. No one has agreed on what rights or obligations an associate member country would have, and figuring that out—and getting some kind of resolution passed—would be necessary for anyone, including Canada and Australia, to get closer in that way with the EU.
What I’d like to talk about today is why this proposal was made, what it could mean if it eventually becomes more concrete, and whatever happens, what these statements tell us about the way global alliances are changing.
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The EU has 27 member countries, but there are already a few different ways to be connected to it.
Full member nations help write EU law and send representatives to its institutions. They all participate in the single market, which means goods, services, money, and people can move across member nation borders under shared rules.
The single market is distinct from the customs union, which sets common tariffs on goods imported from elsewhere. Both are distinct from the Schengen area, which removes most routine passport checks between participating countries. And nations that use the euro are another group entirely. These arrangements tend to overlap, but they’re not the same thing, and membership in one does not automatically mean membership in all the others.
There are also countries outside the EU that participate in some of its systems. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein belong to the European Economic Area and are part of the single market. To do that they have to accept many EU rules, although they don’t vote on those rules as that would require full EU membership. Switzerland has built its own set of bilateral arrangements with the EU. And Britain, after leaving the union, has also negotiated a special trade and cooperation agreement with it.
So there are precedents for a country having a deep relationship with the EU without being a member. But there’s no ready-made ‘associate’ slot that Canada can just step into.
There’s a legal distinction here, too. The EU treaties say that a European state can apply to become a member, and Canada is not a European state. The treaties separately allow the EU to make association agreements with countries outside the bloc, and it already has many kinds of agreements with external partners. An association agreement, though, does not make that partner a member of the Union.
“Associate member” could eventually become a useful name for a new collection of rights and obligations held by nations outside those existing parameters. For now, though, it’s a political invitation and a negotiating idea, not a defined legal status.
All that said, Canada isn’t starting from scratch on this. Its trade agreement with the EU, called CETA, has been applied provisionally since 2017. Most of it is already in effect, though ten EU countries still haven’t completed the ratification required for the whole of the agreement to go into force.
CETA removes most tariffs and opens some opportunities for companies on each side, but it doesn’t make Canada part of the single market. A Canadian product can be easier to sell in Europe without a Canadian worker gaining a general right to take a job there. That’s part of the distinction between a trade deal and the sort of relationship people sometimes imagine when they hear the phrase “union membership.”
Canada also joined Horizon Europe, the EU’s major research funding program, in 2024. It has a security and defense partnership with the EU, and it became the first country outside Europe to join an EU defense financing initiative called SAFE.
That means some of the proposed future relationship already exists, but in pieces rather than as a unified whole. The question is whether those pieces can be connected and extended into something much more ambitious and holistic.
Now, important to understanding the why of all this is understanding Canada’s relationship with the US, and how that relationship has been fraying, of late.
Canada’s economy is deeply integrated with that of the United States. Its proximity to the massive US market has brought enormous benefits, but it also means a change in American trade policy can have an immediate and dramatic effect on Canadian businesses. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and repeated suggestions that Canada should become the 51st state have made that dependence more than a little politically uncomfortable.
For Carney, a closer European relationship offers a way to reduce the risk of having too many economic and security decisions shaped by one increasingly unpredictable and at times belligerent neighboring country. Europe has its own reasons to be interested in closer ties. Canada has energy and critical minerals, industrial capacity, research institutions, and a role in the Arctic. Both sides also support Ukraine and work together through NATO and other forums.
Von der Leyen has proposed cooperation with Canada on batteries, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, and defense production. Carney has added ideas about financial services and opportunities for young people to live, work, and study across the Atlantic.
This isn’t a plan to move Canada’s economy from one continent to another. Geography still matters. A car part crossing the US-Canada border may be part of a production chain built up over decades; a new trade agreement with Europe doesn’t instantly recreate or replace that chain.
But diversification doesn’t require replacing one partner with another. It can mean having additional buyers, suppliers, research collaborators, and sources of investment, so that a disruption in one relationship is less damaging.
The costs and limits matter here, too. Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has warned that deeper EU ties could mean higher costs and Canadian industries being regulated from Brussels. His motives in bringing this up are likely at least partly political, but it’s a question worth asking: if Canada wants more access to a tightly regulated European market, which European standards would it have to accept as a tradeoff?
Europe would face its own questions. EU governments have spent decades building shared rules among countries that accept reciprocal obligations. They may not want to give a distant partner the benefits of those standards without comparable commitments. The fact that ten member states have yet to ratify the existing Canada trade agreement is a reminder that closer ties require more than an enthusiastic speech from the Commission presid…


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