by Paweł Skała-Piękoś
Note on method: I developed and revised this essay in Polish through an AI-enhanced process, using OpenAI’s ChatGPT Sol 6.1 and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 for conceptual sparring, source comparison and editorial refinement. AI tools also helped prepare the English version. I selected, rejected and revised their suggestions; the political position, final editorial decisions and responsibility for publication are mine.
When Mark Carney sat beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May 2025, it was hard to see anything promising in the scene. The president of the United States was still entertaining the idea of turning his neighbour into the fifty-first state; Canada’s prime minister had to remind him that some things cannot be bought. When Trump remarked that one should never say never, Carney answered with a single word: never. Canada’s independence was being discussed as though it were an unfinished transaction, and a hostile takeover at that.
The losses are easiest to see. Trust, the foundation of the two countries’ partnership for decades, had been undermined; plans were no longer secure; a long-standing closeness had become hostage to the whims of one man and his court. Yet the greatest danger is not the language of transactions but the actual change in the partner’s standing. Its arguments can now be treated as obstacles to one’s own goals, while its strength ceases to look like a source of shared success and begins to look like an impediment to American advantage.
And yet the collapse of familiar possibilities carries hope. A threat to one bond prompts the building of others and allows a measure of optimism about the future; a measure of drama, too, because what is at stake is an order whose rules bind even the stronger party. We have grown used to it and breathe it like air, although in the span of history it is a brief phenomenon, threatened from its birth by tyrannies of every kind.
In September 2026, Ursula von der Leyen proposed in the European Parliament that Canada be offered a path to becoming the Union’s first “associate member”. The term deserves a moment’s attention, because it is easily confused with something that already exists. The Union has long concluded association agreements: with Turkey since 1963, with Chile, with countries in the Western Balkans, with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia; Canada itself has been associated with the Horizon Europe programme since 2024. None of these arrangements, however, is called membership, and the treaties recognise no category of associate member. Von der Leyen was therefore proposing a new status whose substance has yet to be written. The following day, speaking in the same chamber, Carney welcomed the invitation and said that the two sides would determine the shape of the new relationship together; at the press conference after his speech, he added that the name was a matter for Brussels, that substance was what counted, and that the final form of the alliance would be debated and voted on in Canada’s Parliament. Trump warned that he could regard such a move as a hostile act. The speeches established no membership, granted no new rights and set no deadline; they established something more modest, but still significant: an intention publicly expressed on both sides of the Atlantic, a stated procedure and a venue for the next discussion, the EU–Canada summit in Montreal on October 29 and 30.
The American–Canadian conflict and Canada’s rapprochement with Europe raise a question I consider one of the most interesting of this decade: how far voluntary cooperation can take societies that want to expand their possibilities together, and where its boundaries lie. The president of the United States is crossing those boundaries in spectacular fashion. The Union and Canada are trying to define and respect them. That second course is heartening, because it defends a world worth living in.
From the European side of the Atlantic, this looks like more than a Canadian attempt to reduce dependence on the United States. It looks like a wish to enlarge a community committed to freedom. For a Polish liberal and an enthusiast for Europe, it is particularly interesting: we have known the argument about whether joining a larger whole diminishes independence or increases it since the debates before our accession. We now have experience to draw on.
In the year Poland joined the Union, its GDP per capita, adjusted for differences in prices, stood at about 52 percent of the average for today’s twenty-seven-member EU. Eurostat’s preliminary estimates put it at 81 percent in 2025. The comparison alone cannot establish how much of that convergence we owe to membership. The Polish Economic Institute examined that separately: in a 2024 report, it estimated that Poland’s GDP per capita was around 40 percent higher than it would have been without accession, and in an April 2026 update it added that, without membership, our economy in 2024 would have remained at its 2015 level. The figures show how far we have travelled within the community, with access to its market and to funding for development.
Britain’s Brexit reckoning warns against equating formal independence with a greater capacity to act. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent institution that assesses Britain’s public finances, continues to assume that the new trading relationship with the EU will reduce the United Kingdom’s long-run productivity by around 4 percent relative to remaining in the Union. It is tempting to set Poland’s growth rate against that, but the comparison measures something else: Poland grew faster than Britain both before and after the 2016 referendum because it is catching up, not because the British left. Brexit is measured against a counterfactual, such as the OBR’s, rather than by a race with a country that was running faster anyway.
Membership also allows us to help set the rules of a larger order, rather than merely adapt to decisions made elsewhere. Shared institutions limit the ease with which economic or military superiority can be converted into political diktat. In the Council of the European Union, a qualified majority requires the agreement of at least 55 percent of member states representing at least 65 percent of the population; in Parliament, smaller states have proportionately more representatives per inhabitant than larger ones. A country’s size matters, but the common rules also give smaller participants a voice.
I want a federal Europe under a liberal–social-democratic–conservative banner. I know how that sounds, and I know who first gave this combination its name. In his essay “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist,” published in English in London’s Encounter in October 1978 and in Polish in the émigré journal Aneks the following year, Leszek Kołakowski set out the creeds of three traditions and asked whether one could hold all three at once. What I take from that credo above all is the friction between goods. His conservative knows that no improvement in collective life comes without some deterioration, and that many goods limit one another, so history has no happy ending. His liberal knows that security is not freedom and usually grows at its expense. His socialist knows that economic freedom may be restricted for the sake of security, but that a restriction of freedom must then be called a restriction, rather than a higher form of freedom, and that social control of the economy requires institutions protecting freedom against the expansion of control itself. Kołakowski found this collection of ideas consistent: one could therefore be a conservative-liberal-socialist. He added, however, that a great International of its adherents would never arise, because it could not promise people happiness. I take that qualification with the rest: the Europe I want does not promise happiness either, only conditions in which people can pursue it for themselves.
For me, this is a starting point for thinking about Europe’s future. I insist first on liberal freedom, because it takes precedence in this combination: the ability to arrange one’s own life, create, run a business, associate with others and challenge power. Social-democratic responsibility immediately asks who can actually use those possibilities; education, healthcare and material security help determine whether a person can undertake something of their own or escape a relationship of dependence. Conservative caution reminds us how much independence we owe to things we did not create ourselves: language, institutions, local bonds, the experience of previous generations. In reforming these forms of life, we also bear responsibility for the people who find support in them; everyone nevertheless retains the right to criticise them, change them and leave them behind. These three voices do not resolve into a single doctrine, and Kołakowski was honest enough not to promise one. They provide something else: a measure by which each must answer to the others. That measure is subjecthood.
I wrote about it in “When Liberalism Meets a Person“: to be a subject is to be treated as someone who can be the author of their own life and take part in correcting the rules by which they are recognised. Freedom and subjecthood are intertwined, but each reveals a different kind of harm. One can have a wide range of permitted actions and very little influence over the rules that give those actions their meaning.
For groups, this is the difference between a minority allowed to state its opinion and a minority whose opinion can change the outcome. It is not a matter of winning every dispute; one can lose a fairly heard case and remain a subject. What matters is that the final shape of our common life should not be settled without those it concerns, and that their part in shaping its rules should not depend on whether they happen to win. The question of subjecthood is therefore different from the question of the result: did the minority’s or the individual’s contribution have any chance of changing anything, whether or not it prevailed? If it could change nothing from the outset, that is permanent exclusion from influence, rather than a defeat.
A federal European Union should serve such a society and the values that allow us to build and sustain it: a common government with defined powers, a budget and the means to carry out its decisions, subject to democratic scrutiny. In defence, that means an army of its own and the ability to act without negotiating every step anew with every national government. There is a price: the Polish government, too, would have to implement decisions it would not have chosen and accept a reduction in its own powers. It would be an interesting case of a national government narrowing its authority in favour of a larger organisation in order to enlarge the subjecthood of its citizens. I therefore accept the cost of limiting sovereignty if citizens gain an effective government with defined powers that they can hold accountable and replace in elections. I imagine that the inhabitants of the thirteen former colonies during the debates over ratification of the Constitution, and later the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas in 1845, understood this dilemma in much the same way.
Federalisation, of course, concerns the division of power within the Union. A relationship with Canada requires a separate agreement on rights and obligations that also increase Canadians’ capacity to choose; European ambition cannot decide for them how far they wish to go. Europe must nevertheless unite if it is to become a pillar on which something larger, lasting and independent can rest.
Fortunately, some of this cooperation is already working. Canadian organisations could participate in Horizon Europe before, usually with their own or national funding. The agreement associating Canada with the programme’s second pillar, signed in July 2024, gave them access to direct funding and the right to lead consortia on terms similar to those applying to EU partners.
It is worth pausing over the unromantic word “consortium.” Whoever leads one is responsible for the shape of the shared project and has more influence over the questions it asks; whoever has access to direct funding participates on the same terms as EU partners, rather than having to find money at home. Participants share resources, knowledge and responsibility, and that arrangement can produce an idea none of them brought to it fully formed.
That is what attracts me to a voluntary community. Other people’s freedom becomes a support for mine, because they bring their own goals, abilities and unexpected answers. Cooperation makes sense even when it restricts some immediate choices; we accept an obligation so that we can plan and carry out something larger. I am drawn to the joy of connection, the sense that we can do more with others. A healthy community also requires that a person should still count as someone even when they cease to share its enthusiasm, opinions or way of life; they can bring an idea of their own, refuse, change their mind and influence the common plan.
We must also know how to defend such a community against those who would impose their will on it. From a Polish perspective, the military dimension is obvious, because security allows people to plan their lives without constant submission to someone else’s threat. Russia’s war against Ukraine tests this responsibility: can Europe provide the means to people defending their right to a life of their own? Canada’s cooperation with its European allies already has a concrete form; a multinational NATO brigade under Canadian command operates in Latvia.
Canada also participates in SAFE, the EU instrument that finances joint arms purchases; the agreement was signed in February 2026 and formally concluded by the Council in June, making Canada the first country outside Europe admitted to the mechanism. That same month, Canada’s government and the manufacturer announced the first Canadian contract under SAFE: Montreal’s Marconi Technologies, together with Poland’s Enamor International, will supply Orion X650 radios to the Polish military, with deliveries scheduled for 2026–2030.
The brigade and the equipment order show two sides of the same need. The capacity to defend ourselves grows through training, logistics, communications, production and planning. Each of these words sounds more modest than sovereignty, and each can determine what sovereignty is worth when it is put to the test.
This cooperation opens a path toward joint planning and more deeply integrated formations; creating them will require separate decisions. NATO remains the main foundation, and greater European and Canadian capabilities strengthen the alliance. We also need capabilities that will be useful if American help fails to arrive.
Building shared European strength also requires decisions within the community: costs and benefits fall unevenly, and resources devoted to one goal cannot serve another at the same time. If we want closer cooperation, we should give its participants a real say in our common priorities.
Consider Wallonia’s resistance to CETA, the trade agreement between the EU and Canada. In October 2016, opposition from the regional parliament held up Belgium’s signature and led to additional declarations and arrangements; Belgium undertook, among other things, to ask the Court of Justice of the European Union to assess the mechanism for settling investment disputes. The treaty itself was not rewritten. In 2019, the Court found the mechanism compatible with EU law. The dispute therefore had a limited but real institutional effect.
Wallonia is a small region by European standards, but it had a parliament, a minister-president, lawyers and a formal right to block the signature; without its opposition, the compromise would have looked different. An individual has none of these tools. We must therefore ask whether someone without institutional backing has an equally real avenue of appeal. Subjecthood matters especially when an efficient organiser is already certain that they know better. It includes the ability to raise an objection, obtain reasons and appeal to an independent body capable of changing the decision. That route must also be available to someone without money, time, connections or lawyers of their own; otherwise, dissent remains a privilege of the best organised.
A community also needs decisions that can be carried out within a definite time. Disagreement alone gives no right to block everyone else’s decisions indefinitely. One can lose a vote on shared spending priorities and retain full standing as a participant, with the opportunity to hold representatives accountable at elections. An allegation that rights have been violated, however, requires independent scrutiny even when a majority supports the decision.
The argument over European strength is also taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. In the national security strategy released in December 2025, the Trump administration declares its support for a group of allied sovereign nations taking primary responsibility for their own defence. The same document presents EU and supranational institutions as a threat to freedom and sovereignty, looks hopefully toward “patriotic” parties and recommends encouraging resistance to Europe’s current course.
It is worth looking, then, at how the same administration treats dissent at home, given its eagerness to discuss freedom in Europe. On March 6, 2025, Trump issued an executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, citing its work for Hillary Clinton in his justification. The order provided for restrictions on the firm’s employees’ access to government buildings and the termination of federal contracts involving its services. Clients began taking their cases away. On May 2, a federal district court found the order an unconstitutional retaliation for constitutionally protected activity and barred its enforcement. The comparison with Wallonia is instructive. In the European model, the smaller participant’s dissent was given a procedure, a court and a lasting place in the documents, while the participant retained full standing. In Trump’s model, dissent was met with an executive order, and standing was rescued only by a court. The actors differ: Wallonia is a public authority with a formal veto, Perkins Coie a private law firm. The question, however, is the same: what does a political order do with someone who stands in the way of those more powerful? There was plenty of hostility in the CETA dispute; there, a procedure allowed dissent to bring about a correction of the common arrangements, while here an executive order sought to suppress it. I see an attempt to use the economic power of the state to weaken people who help others challenge power. The resistance of the firm and the court also shows that America still has something to defend, and people capable of defending it.
One thing needs stressing here, because forgetting it is irritating, and should be. I am grateful for America’s part in defeating Nazi tyranny and for its help in rebuilding Western Europe. Normandy and the Marshall Plan remind us that people across the ocean considered our fate their concern as well. That gratitude does not oblige me to take part in a ritual of compulsory thanks to Donald Trump, of the kind demanded of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025; it obliges me to think about Europe’s responsibility for building a community of free people. Demanding gratitude as proof of obedience is an attempt to enforce servility, not humility.
America’s constitutional tradition offers a language for that task. In Federalist No. 9, Hamilton, drawing on Montesquieu, considered a union of republics combining internal freedom with the strength needed for defence; Madison added in No. 51 that ambition must counteract ambition. We inherit the work of building and limiting power, and our vigilance must extend to the country whose achievements we rightly admire.
I want a strong, federal Europe with an army to match its economic potential. I want firm resistance to Trump, his circle and those who continue his policies. There is no anti-Americanism in that. There is loyalty to American liberals, progressives and everyone who values an order grounded in law, defends freedom and democratic institutions, and upholds people’s equal standing. The free world needs a Europe capable of sustaining our common principles even in opposition to the U.S. government.
If the Democrats win November’s congressional elections, it will be easier to constrain the Trump administration, and a future Democratic administration could rebuild trust. Cooperation would then become easier, but Europe would still need strength of its own. Together with Canada, it should be able to sustain the conditions for a free life even if liberal democracy suffers defeat in the United States. That requires economic, technological, cultural and military dynamism. Several strong centres working together give freedom a better chance of survival and renewal than one.
If cooperation with a democratic America were restored, more of our shared effort could go toward limiting global warming, resisting Russia’s aggressive policies, Chinese techno-totalitarianism and religious fanaticism, and meeting the new challenges brought by artificial intelligence.
I would like an American defending freedom at home to be able to look across the ocean and see societies that remember what they owe, and can now shoulder more themselves. Strong friends, capable of carrying on our common work. We can show gratitude to America while firmly opposing the policies of its government.
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