Fulbright Finland News Magazine
The relationship between Finland and the United States is excellent. It rests on shared interests, common cultural roots, and a mutual recognition of what each side brings to the table. Ultimately, it rests upon relations between our people and institutions.
I have always believed that the most durable partnerships are those built around complementary strengths rather than dependence. Finland is a small country of 5.6 million people, yet we punch well above our weight in technology, research, and engineering talent. U.S. universities, research institutions, and companies have long recognized this. The flow of Finnish researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs into U.S. institutions — and the reverse — has shaped fields from mobile communications to quantum computing.
This is why I am proud that Finland further strengthened this partnership, when I signed the Pax Silica Declaration last month at the U.S. Department of State in Washington.
If the twentieth century ran on oil and steel, the twenty-first runs on information computing and the minerals that feed it. This captures something profound about the shifting of geopolitical gravity. Supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure are not commercial abstractions — they are the sinews of national resilience. Finland understands this. We mine and process critical minerals. We host Nokia, a global backbone of trusted connectivity. Our world-class universities produce AI researchers sought by every major technology hub on the planet.
Commercial and research cooperation between countries with complementary expertise and resources — including information networks and connectivity, critical minerals, semiconductors, and energy — are all essential for developing AI and strengthening secure digital infrastructure. These are precisely the sectors where Finnish companies and institutions are already competitive, and where deeper access to American markets, value chains, co-investment frameworks, and R&D partnerships generate tangible results.
The Fulbright community understands better than most that the real currency of the Finland-U.S. relationship is human capital.
I want to be clear about what this means for Finnish and U.S. researchers and innovators specifically. The Fulbright community understands better than most that the real currency of the Finland-U.S. relationship is human capital — the postdoctoral fellow in Boston, the Finnish startup founder building a U.S.-market product, the American researcher spending a year at Aalto or the University of Oulu. Research co-operation and exchanges create and deepen personal connections which generate lasting value. Fulbright opens more opportunities for Finnish researchers to collaborate in the U.S., including in new fields where Finland’s strengths lie.
Besides technology, humanities are one of the important fields that Fulbright operates in. The Fulbright Finland Foundation funds U.S. citizens — students, scholars, and professionals — to teach, research, or study in fields such as literature, history, philosophy, and arts. These subjects broaden our understanding of ourselves and the surrounding world, as well as our cultural heritage.
More broadly, the Fulbright program was founded on the premise that educational and cultural exchange serves peace. Fulbright operates on an analogous logic at the level of economic architecture: when trusted democracies bind their ecosystems together — sharing not just goods but standards, infrastructure, and research — they simultaneously make each other more secure and more prosperous. Economic security is national security, and national security is economic security. That is not a slogan. For Finland, a country that has navigated its geography with clear eyes for decades, it is simply a statement of fact.
Finland was one of the first countries invited to join the Fulbright Program in 1947, and still today we are one of the most engaged partners. I am particularly pleased and appreciate that in January 2026 the U.S. Congress appropriated special funding for the Fulbright exchange to Finland. This demonstrates the value of our program. I wish you all the best of luck in your endeavours.
Read the whole Fulbright Finland News magazine 1/2026!
