In its original forms as it emerged in the nineteenth century social democracy was resolutely internationalist. Existing and established states were associated with the privileged orders of the ancien régime and the embodiment of property interests. The early social democratic movements in Europe saw themselves as operating outside existing forms of the state, creating new forms of cooperation and community beyond the reach of the state, and anticipating the overthrow of the existing forms of the state in a remaking of both politics and society. This transformation was expected to be international. A fundamental tenet of early social democracy was that the working class had no country. The solidarity of the working class existed across all spatial divisions, whether national or regional, and the new world order which socialists wished to bring about would transcend national divisions.

For most of the period since the First World War, however, social democracy has been predominantly national in character, following the breakdown of the liberal world order in the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. The hopes for building an international solidarity of labour in the nineteenth century had been based on a world in which economic integration was proceeding apace, and in which connections were being established between all regions and all peoples of the globe. The old territorial political divisions were seen as increasingly irrelevant to this new world of freedom of movement of people, goods and capital, which by the first decade of the twentieth century was in certain respects more globalised than the contemporary international order.