This presentation will explore how the Kemalist Turkish nationalists, and the exiled Kurdish nationalists coming from Turkey responded to the debate over internationalism during the late 1920s and 1930s. Both the founding cadre of the Kemalist Turkish Republic, and the Kurdish nationalist elites living in exile had come of age in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the late-Ottoman Empire. They, however, adopted the prevailing ideology of ethnic nationalism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and dedicated themselves to forging ethnically defined Turkish and Kurdish national identities. Despite the ever-increasing number of studies on the Kemalist Turkish and Kurdish nationalist movements, these two rival nationalist movements’ responses to the internationalism debate of the interwar years continues to be a neglected topic. Thus, I want to compare former Ottoman Kurdish and Turkish nationalists’ responses to fading but still existing calls for internationalism for world peace in the late 1920s and 1930s. I will make use of primary sources in Turkish and Kurdish from the late 1920s and the 1930s published in Kemalist Turkey and in Syria under the French mandate. My sources include writings and statements by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the Kurdish Bedirkhan brothers.