In current debates about globalisation, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This vision obscures a major historical fact: for around a century - from the 1860s to the 1970s - worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed, what it accomplished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and why it collapsed over the past forty years, to the point of disappearing from our memories.
About the book
In current debates about globalisation, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This vision obscures a major historical fact: for around a century - from the 1860s to the 1970s - worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed, what it accomplished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and why it collapsed over the past forty years, to the point of disappearing from our memories.