On 30 October, at the end of their two-day summit in Montreal, Canada and the EU launched what they called an “Alliance for the Future”, promising in a joint statement to define, before their next summit in 2027, “an ever-closer association of Canada to the EU, short of full membership itself”. The follow-through on the summit will offer an early test of whether such middle-power coalitions have credible prospects in a world in which Washington, Beijing, and Moscow see themselves, and each other, as the only powers that matter for now.

The compromise formula of “association” had become necessary because of EU-internal disagreements. In September, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, had offered Canada the chance to become the EU’s first “associate member”. Germany, backed by Greece and others, objected to the term, worried about legal uncertainty and the expectations it might raise in other countries. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, used it anyway at the Montreal summit’s closing press conference: “Today we move toward associate membership for Canada and we launch a new alliance for the future.”

Five weeks earlier, on the margins of the UN General Assembly, Canada and the EU had co-founded another initiative, Partners for Multilateralism, together with Australia, Barbados, Brazil, India, and Kenya. That attempt at middle-power diplomacy earned a single mention in the 46 paragraphs of the Montreal statement, and even then only as background to reforming the UN. This imbalance sits awkwardly with Canada’s recent efforts to try its hand at middle-power coalition building again.

Multilateralism or plurilateralism?

Carney has been unusually explicit about what he believes. In an essay for The Economist in November 2025, he argued that “the twilight of multilateralism will be followed by the rise of plurilateralism”. In his view, the future belongs to purpose-built coalitions organised around specific interests, and the successful ones among them will grow by attracting new members.

The Montreal summit fits that description. Ottawa’s official account presents the EU-Canada Alliance for the Future as drawing on “a variable geometry of like-minded nations”. According to an EU official, other countries have already expressed interest. Partners for Multilateralism, by contrast, appears to have met only once so far and has neither a budget nor a secretariat.

This looks like the trajectory of the Alliance for Multilateralism, launched by France and Germany at the UN General Assembly in 2019. It was an informal network that soon claimed the support of more than 50 foreign ministers. Yet, within two years, the alliance seemed to have petered out: its last ministerial meeting took place in September 2021, shortly before its champion, then-German foreign minister Heiko Maas, left office.

Earlier middle-power coalitions suggest further reasons why some endure and others fade. The 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines succeeded because a core of states chose a goal narrow enough to achieve without the great powers. The Cairns Group of agricultural exporters has held together because its members share enough economic interest to bargain as a bloc in global trade talks. The Hague Group, launched in 2025 to uphold international law over Gaza, showed what it means for members to accept a price. It also showed how quickly a change of government can reverse that commitment, as Honduras and Colombia have since demonstrated.

What such coalitions show is that middle powers lack general power but can build issue-specific leverage when a clear objective, a committed coalition, and an institutional strategy line up.

Why a closer Canada–EU partnership may not widen the circle

Can a bilateral alliance become the nucleus of a wider coalition? The Alliance for the Future and Partners for Multilateralism serve different purposes. The first brings Canada closer to the EU; the second brings together countries with different interests and geopolitical alignments. A stronger Canada-EU partnership could give middle-power cooperation more resources and political weight. But it could also make Partners for Multilateralism less attractive to countries such as Brazil and India, which have little interest in joining a Western-led bloc. The closer Ottawa and Brussels move towards each other, the harder it may be to bring others along.

The Montreal summit did produce tangible advances, from digital trade to cooperation on critical resources and supercomputing. But closer economic integration between Canada and the EU says little about their ability to mobilise a wider group of middle powers.

The founders of Partners for Multilateralism have their own priorities. India prizes strategic autonomy, Brazil wants a more representative international order, while Kenya and Barbados have pressing interests in development finance and climate resilience. This diversity gives the initiative potential reach well beyond the West, but also limits how far Ottawa and Brussels can set its agenda.

Successful middle-power coalitions of the past did more than express shared concerns about the international order. They identified a rule they wanted to establish, a decision they wanted to influence, or a negotiating position they could advance together. Partners for Multilateralism has yet to identify such a goal.

Five tests for potential success

The track record of past efforts also implies five tests to judge whether Ottawa and Brussels are likely to succeed in leading a wider coalition of middle powers into a new international order.

First, leadership costs money. In Montreal, Canada signalled its “intention to join” the EU’s €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan. That spreads an existing burden rather than adding new money, at a time when Brussels is looking to partners to cover a €70 billion gap in Ukraine’s budget for 2027. Canada’s federal budget, due on 5 November, will show whether more is coming.

Second, any middle-power coalition will need to build defence capabilities that can be sustained. Canada is the first non-European participant in Security Action for Europe (SAFE), the EU’s defence procurement scheme, and Canadian firms have won contracts to supply radios to Poland and helmets to Latvia. But the joint statement merely takes note of Carney’s proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank. In October, Britain decided not to join the bank, preferring a separate scheme with the Netherlands, Poland, and Finland. Pooling defence capacity sounds easy at summits. It gets harder once headquarters, procurement rules, and memberships are at stake.

Third, while military defence is important, economic defence increasingly matters as well, and any middle-power coalition will need to make economic coercion harder for the great powers that practise it. The EU already has an Anti-Coercion Instrument to respond to economic pressure against itself or its member-states, but it does not extend the same protection to Canada. The closest to this in the Montreal summit statement is a joint commitment to limit the “negative effects” of each side’s economic security measures on the other. That is a promise of restraint between partners, not of joint defence against a third party — even though US president Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Europe if he judged associate membership for Canada to be a “hostile act”.

Fourth, whatever the exact vision that the EU and Canada have in mind, it needs to be built in a way that it can survive disagreement. The dispute over the label did not derail the summit, and Germany’s ambassador to Canada urged that it should not distract from the substance. But the two sides now describe the outcome differently. Ottawa’s press release after the summit still speaks of Canada becoming the EU’s “first Associate Member”, a phrase the joint statement avoids. On the trade agreement that underpins the relationship, the statement no longer calls explicitly for full ratification. Nine EU member-states have yet to ratify it, nine years after it provisionally entered into force.

Finally, any durable middle-power coalition will need to offer a common story, and live by it. The joint statement “deeply” regrets US sanctions on the International Criminal Court, an unusually direct rebuke of an ally. But it also leans on the language of the “rules-based international order”, a phrase many governments in the global south treat with suspicion. The Partners for Multilateralism declaration instead spoke of international law. The difference is more than rhetorical: defending international law would also mean upholding it when doing so conflicts with members’ own interests or those of their allies. Diplomats at the UN suspect that the US, China, and Russia want a next secretary-general who will administer rather than challenge them — “a secretary, not a general”, as the phrase goes. The permanent members of the Security Council can veto any candidate, but other countries can still coordinate behind one willing to stand up to the great powers. Whether Partners for Multilateralism can unite behind a candidate prepared to stand up to the great powers, however, remains an open question.

What to watch

Given that regional heavyweights such as Brazil, India, and South Africa are “not sure who appointed Canada … to lead a new post-American world order”, the EU-Canada summit in Montreal is unlikely to have reassured them. If Partners for Multilateralism is to avoid the fate of the Alliance for Multilateralism, Brussels and Ottawa will have to make a conscious effort for it to become the place where issue-specific coalitions of the kind Carney favours are assembled, funded, and held together. But much will also depend on what Brazil, a co-founder of Partners for Multilateralism whose president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won re-election on 25 October, chooses to make of it.

The underlying questions remain simple. What are these governments prepared to pay for? What capabilities are they prepared to contribute? And what constraints on their own behaviour are they prepared to accept? In Montreal, Canada and the EU began to answer the first two for each other; the third, which asks the most of them, they left open. Whether Partners for Multilateralism becomes more than a name will depend on its other founders, from Brazil and India to Kenya, Australia, and Barbados, giving answers of their own — and on all of them following through.

This analysis draws on Martin Waehlisch and Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 3 November 2026.

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