The French bicycle industry apparently agreed on national standardized threadings and diameters for their bikes after WW2 from what I have read. Prior to that it was proprietary diameters and threading like Raleigh is notorious for having used.

The committee that set up ISO bicycle size and threading standards did so based on the English bike standard as that was the standard that Japan had chosen for their exports to the U.S. and was used by all of the English makers except Raleigh. Majority ruled!

There can still be problems with older so called metric fasteners from various countries as until ISO set international standards for Metric thread pitches each country such as France, Germany and Japan had mutually incompatible thread pitch "metric" fasteners. Early Honda motorcycles used JIS standard metric fasteners, only normally available at Honda motorcycle dealers.