At its inception the labour movement was almost instinctively internationalist in its outlook. In the twentieth century, however, there was a steady drift towards a more “nation-statist” perspective by most Northern unions and labour movements, examined in the section on the national era below. Conventionally, the First World War is seen as the point at which labour internationalism died. Following the Second World War the international labour movement was split by the Cold War between the West and “communism”. This gave rise to the nefarious practice of “trade union imperialism”, through which Western unions sought to influence their counterparts in the South. The international trade unions also began to counter the multinationals in the 1970s, however, in what we can call a transition period, by trying to build countervailing power on the labour side of the capital/wage labour relation. There is now, across the political spectrum and across the world, a feeling that we are entering a new period of labour internationalism. The global era demands a global labour response now that the divisions of the Cold War are a distant memory. In a way, this “new” internationalism is renewing a very “old” tradition of the labour movement, reaching back to the First International of Marx’s day. We examine how labour internationalism has developed in the era of globalization as we, supposedly, move beyond the nation state. I suggest that this new internationalism has not always surpassed the traditional conception of transnational collective bargaining. It needs to embrace a more “social movement” type of unionism in order to remain relevant and to represent the emerging global working class.

The national era

It is remarkable how relevant the debates of nineteenth-century internationalism are for us now in the era of globalization. The second half of the nineteenth century also saw a move towards globalization, with world trade increasing sixfold between 1850 and 1890. Van der Linden, writing about the period of Western state formation, could be referring to the present when he writes: “[A]n improved transport and communication network led to a heightened mobility of labour power and capital, and in its wake a weakening of unions organised solely at a local level” (van der Linden 1988: 324).