Many voluntary associations during the interwar years, promoted international understanding among children and adults alike in the hope of avoiding another global war. The League of Unions in Britain was one of these. It lobbied the government to advocate for the newly founded League of Nations, whilst also seeking to convince and educate a wider public, promoting a ‘world citizenship’ that crossed national boundaries. Children and young people were a key constituency for the LNU’s promotional efforts as they would be the ones to take its agenda forward in the future. To create world citizenship among this younger generation, the LNU argued that “new knowledge” alone was insufficient; a “change of feeling and purpose” was also required. The LNU sought to change hearts as well as minds. Recognising this potentially troubles analyses of citizenship that focus on knowledge and dispassionate discussion as a basis for political action in national and international contexts (e.g. Habermas 1989, Case 2018), but chimes with recent analyses both of internationalism (e.g. Scaglia 2019) and citizenship in a range of broader contexts (e.g. Kingston et al. 2017) which emphasise affective dimensions. Relevant emotions include feelings of sympathy and empathy, optimism and anticipation, and also fear. This paper builds on previous scholarship on the LNU, education, and the young (e.g. Wright 2020, McCarthy 2011), to focus in on the emotional components of the LNU’s world citizenship as envisaged for and experienced by the young. Drawing on selected exemplars from the LNU’s publications and records, teaching periodicals, and accounts by members of its junior branches, it explores ways in which emotions were incorporated within the ways that world citizenship was envisaged for and described by the young internationalists who encountered the LNU.

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