GLOBSEC 2026 begins from a single premise: the crisis is not coming — it has already happened. The rules-based international order is not under pressure; it has fractured, and what is emerging in its place is not yet legible. The war in Ukraine, the rupture of the transatlantic relationship, the weaponisation of energy and supply chains, and the collapse of multilateral consensus are not separate crises to be managed sequentially. They are symptoms of a single deeper transformation — a global system in the process of becoming something else, without a clear picture of what that something is. Three figures who have lived this transformation from starkly different vantage points open the Forum by attempting not to resolve that uncertainty, but to name it honestly — and to give delegates the frame through which every conversation that follows can be understood.
- We describe the current moment as a crisis, but crises imply resolution — a return to stability on the other side. What if what we are living through is not a crisis but a permanent transition, with no guaranteed destination?
- The fracture has not affected all countries equally — some are losing the order they built, some are constructing a new one, and some are calculating how to profit from the space between the two. Is Europe positioned to shape what comes next, or merely to respond to it?
- If the leaders in this room had to identify one thing that must be preserved from the collapsing order and one thing that must be released, what would those things be?
Executive Summary The panellists used this session to challenge the terms of conventional debate about Europe’s decline, arguing that the continent's apparent weaknesses — fragmentation, regulatory complexity, asymmetric threat perceptions across member states — are also sources of resilience that more centralised powers cannot replicate. The panel was unsparing about Europe's self-inflicted vulnerabilities: household savings flowing into American markets, capital markets that remain nationally fragmented despite decades of effort, procurement and regulatory cycles too slow to match Ukraine's battlefield innovation tempo, and a demographic trajectory that no government has found the political courage to address honestly. Ivan Krastev offered the session's sharpest reframe: the problem is not which answer Europe chooses but that it keeps asking the same questions, and genuine transformation requires changing the questions themselves. The session closed with a shared forecast: the strategic error Europe will most regret in ten years is not military unreadiness but the failure to secure control over its own data.
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