Finland's Stubb delivers Bruges address on Europe, war, democracy and AI
President of Finland Alexander Stubb delivered a keynote address at the opening ceremony of the academic year of the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, on 26 October 2026. The speech was framed as a reflection on Europe's past 30 years, its present security and political environment, and the next 30 years as seen from the perspective of students beginning their studies.
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Stubb opened by citing Reinhold Niebuhr's 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. He used the book's contrast between moral purpose and self-interest to frame his argument about democracy and human nature.
He said he first read the book as an undergraduate at Furman University in the United States, and said he had returned to it while preparing the Bruges speech. He told the audience that when he studied after the end of the Cold War, there was strong reason for optimism.
He contrasted that period with 2026, which he described as a time with many reasons for pessimism. He said his own studies began in an "Era of Light," while the students before him were beginning in an "Era of Darkness." Stubb said his aim was to persuade the students that "there is light at the end of the tunnel." He said they should use the agency given by education so that one of them could return in 30 years as a president, prime minister, or professor and say that they had helped turn an Era of Darkness back into an Era of Light.
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He structured the speech in three parts: the world 30 years ago, the world today, and the world 30 years from now. He said his focus would be Europe and the students at the College of Europe.
He then described the mid-1990s as a period when the Berlin Wall had fallen, Central and Eastern Europe had been freed from communism, and the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991. Stubb said Finland, Sweden, and Austria joined the European Union during the year he studied in Bruges, from 1994 to 1995.
He said the period was marked by hope and optimism, with the Cold War over and democracy, capitalism, and freedom having defeated communism, autocracy, and control. He also joked that in Bruges students had to go to the central square to get reception on a Nokia mobile phone, and said there were no email addresses, no internet, no social media, and no artificial intelligence when he studied there in 1995.
He said many people believed in Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis, under which all 200 nation-states would move toward democracy, a social market economy, and globalization. He said hindsight shows that this did not happen globally, but argued that Europe did experience such a moment.
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He did not claim Europe was perfect, but said it had undergone a real end-of-history phase. Stubb recalled reading competing visions of European integration at Bruges, including ideas associated with Altiero Spinelli, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Charles de Gaulle, and Margaret Thatcher.
He also said he remembered debates on functionalism, neofunctionalism, federalism, institutional intergovernmentalism, neorealism, and other "isms" used to explain European integration. He urged students to keep an open mind and said analytical thinking would help them solve practical problems later in life.
He described the Age of Light in Europe as a period centered on enlargement, the euro, institutional change, and democratic reform. He said the major problems of that era were about policy, power, and finance rather than war, and were difficult but not existential.
He said things became more serious after 9/11. Stubb said the US operation in Afghanistan was based on a UN mandate recognizing a country's right to self-defence, while the war in Iraq was not.
He said Europe was united on Afghanistan but split on Iraq. He added that in those days the United States first went to the UN for a mandate and, if that failed, consulted allies and built coalitions of the willing, whereas today it does neither.
He said the Euro crisis became an existential challenge and divided Europe along a north-south axis, but the bloc survived and became stronger. He also described Brexit as a third crisis, saying the UK "amputated a leg without a medical reason for doing so." He said Brexit ultimately unified the EU by showing member states that leaving cost more than staying.
On the present, Stubb said Europe is probably more united today than ever before because of the security threat from Russia and political pressure from the United States. He said Europe is becoming more autonomous and more geopolitical.
He said that when Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine, Europe stepped up and now provides the bulk of the military, financial, and political support for Ukraine. He said Europe continues to support Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
He also said Europe defends the liberal international order, supports international institutions, rules, and norms, believes in the rule of law domestically and internationally, concludes new free-trade agreements, understands strategic dependencies better, leads on climate action, and is the first continent to have begun regulating artificial intelligence. Stubb then turned to the negative side of the global environment.
He said that after the Cold War there had been hope that the world would be built around multilateral institutions such as the UN, the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF, but that today the opposite is true. He said rules are being broken everywhere, the UN Charter is violated daily by countries like Russia, major powers such as the United States have left key institutions such as the WHO and imposed sanctions on others such as the ICC, and China has a high number of dispute cases in the WTO.
He said the world has moved from cooperation to conflict and from managed competition to transactions. He described a "dog-eat-dog world" and said great power competition has trampled the rules-based international order.
He said interdependence in trade, energy, and technology is now used as an instrument of power to drive states apart, rather than bring them together. He also pointed to chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Black Sea as instruments of war with global ramifications.
He said trust in international cooperation has eroded and, according to some accounts, there are 65 live conflicts or wars, more than at any time since the Second World War. He said the UN has been pushed out of peace mediation and that peace deals are transactional and short-lived.
He also said global temperatures continue to rise despite climate-control efforts, some nations deny climate change and lean into fossil fuels, immigration is seen as a threat to national identity, and humanitarian law and human dignity are being violated. In his closing section, Stubb told students not to give in to pessimism or despair.
He said they have agency and must use it to help rebuild the conditions for light. He said they will be the ones to develop technological solutions for climate change, create AI that serves humanity, and find pathways toward ending conflicts.
He urged optimism, saying pessimism can become self-fulfilling, and cited the Finnish saying that a pessimist will never be disappointed, while an optimist will make a difference in the world. Looking ahead 30 years, Stubb said forecasting is difficult and sometimes a guessing game, but that it is still important to identify key issues.
He recalled his opening speech at Bruges in 2015, 2016, when he had focused on the euro, the refugee crisis, and security, and said he had not anticipated that Europe's security environment would become as serious as it did after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He said the "silver lining" for Finland was that it joined NATO.
He said artificial intelligence would be the most self-evident issue of the next 30 years because it will change the economy, work, politics, communication, academia, learning, war, science, and human life itself. He described asking a commercially available AI system what Johannes Gutenberg would have thought of AI, and said the answer suggested fascination mixed with fear, recognition of the power to spread knowledge, concern over who controls information, and worry about the impact on human work.
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