This article examines how the postwar cosmopolitan movement known as Världsmedborgarrörelsen (the World Citizen Movement) reappropriated the concept of Bildung to construct an emancipatory model of bildning and mondialist citizenship. Grounded in a critical interpretation of World War II and the emerging nuclear threat, mondialists mobilized transnational networks - publishing literature, organizing study circles, and promoting peace research - to cultivate morally autonomous, critically engaged individuals committed to pacifism, human rights, and world peace. Situated between utopian aspiration and dystopian crisis, they conceptualized bildning as both a personal and collective process of self-formation capable of transforming passive subjects into active world citizens. Moreover, they transcended traditional Swedish and Scandinavian ‘people’s-home’ welfare ideals by advocating a cosmopolitan ‘world home’ that challenged nationalism, militarism, and the prevailing East-West ideological divide.

The Swedish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (SCND) fought the military’s plans to acquire Swedish nuclear weapons and protested the nuclear arms race, 1961–1967. This article presents SCND’s ideological orientation by focusing on temporalities. SCND saw the Second World War as a decisive event and tried to avert a crisis and a dystopia by manifesting remembrance of past nuclear detonations, and by representing a ‘desperate man’ who needed to act directly against nuclear weapons testing and research. As an opinion-forming force, SCND advocated international negotiations and rejected political initiatives regarding disarmament. Furthermore, SCND refused to take a position between West and East in the Cold War and SCND did not strive for a fundamental change of society, a utopia, which can be explained by SCND’s critique of ideology and from its temporal orientation rooted in the present. Nevertheless, the rise of imperialist-critical internationalism led to internal ideological conflicts, and the Swedish Campaign dissolved when only one of the goals was achieved: when Sweden abandoned the plans for nuclear weapons. Some members insisted on continuing the campaign to fight against not least imperialism, and SCND’s downfall in 1967 can be explained by its challenge to navigate an ideologically multifaceted landscape.

A new social movement was formed in Sweden in 1961: Kampanjen mot atomvapen (KMA, “The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament”). Opposing the military’s plans to acquire Swedish nuclear bombs and protesting against the escalating tensions of the Cold War, KMA in the years 1961‒1963 rallied young people and students and introduced several new forms of collective political actions in the Swedish repertoire of contention. One example was peace or disarmament marches between Swedish cities while another consisted of illegal sit-downs. This article analyzes these new forms of collective action, focusing on the question of how they spread to Sweden. It is here argued that KMA must be seen as a Swedish part of a broad, transnational social movement against nuclear weapons in the years around 1960. The most important national branch of this movement was the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) formed in the late 1950s. Swedish activists travelled to London and participated in CND activities, learning how to organize “easter marches” for disarmament as well as sit-downs. Back in Sweden, they adopted these new forms of collective action (and were, in turn, visited by British as well as Danish activists). For example, they arranged illegal sit-downs outside the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm to protest atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the fall of 1961 and organized peace marches to military facilities in the vicinity of the capital as well as from the city of Södertälje to Stockholm. KMA also used the same symbols as CND, such as the by now well-known circular peace symbol designed by British artist Gerald Holtom. This means that not only new forms of collective action were introduced but also new political identities and ways of organizing new forms of social movements. In turn, this turns KMA into an important precursor of the broader (and more studied) radicalization of Swedish youth in the late 1960s.

In postwar France, a new movement – Citoyens du Monde – emerged with the aim to unite people across the world around the political target of achieving world peace through dissolving the national borders and establishing a worldwide society. In 1949, Världsmedborgarrörelsen (the World Citizen Movement) was established in Sweden as the 21st branch of the movement and represented the new ism mondialism.

The aim of the study is to understand and explain the ideas that propelled Världsmedborgarrörelsen, and how these ideas emerged, evolved and faded away in relation to the prevailing political circumstances. Theoretically, the dissertation draws on formation of -isms and approaches to political temporality. The study is supported by Hannah Arendt’s posited gap in time between memory and expectation as a crucial precondition for political actors as they temporally orient themselves to establish new policies. The study argues that the temporal orientation of world citizens was based on a gap in time filled by the idea that World War II had demonstrated the failure of traditional politics. Furthermore, the would-be citizens of the world forged their political expectations through a ”reactopia”; they presented a utopian political dream to ward off an imagined dystopia of nuclear war. Having experienced World War II and now living under the very real threat of nuclear weapons, Världsmedborgarrörelsen proclaimed that nation states, with their intergovernmental strife and division of people, were paving the way to new wars. By the time Världsmedborgarrörelsen dissolved in the 1960s, it appeared to be a prisoner of its own reactopian temporal orientation. Memories of World War II had faded and the threat of nuclear war diminished. As the new political boundary was drawn between Global North and Global South, the movement found it difficult to mobilise its forces.