This week, in case we needed it, we’ve been given an unpleasant crash course in how interconnected the global economy really is. British savers have to be rescued from potential losses because of the collapse of banks in Iceland. The German Government is forced to offer a multi-trillion-euro guarantee of its entire domestic financial system because of a decision made a few days earlier in Dublin. The inability of borrowers in Nevada to repay their mortgages brings a Japanese life insurer to the brink of bankruptcy.

It is this suddenly global dimension to the crisis that has given added urgency to the usually dreary annual meetings in Washington this weekend of the world’s leading finance ministers and central bank governors.

Because our financial systems are so interdependent, only global coordination of policies stands any chance of working. That is why the United States and Britain, under Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, and Alistair Darling, have been pushing hard among their global partners for a plan to pump new capital into the banking system and to have taxpayers guarantee lending between banks.

Even if these measures can be agreed and even if they succeed (two big ifs), the next part of this global emergency initiative will be a similarly massive effort to stimulate the world’s now sliding economy, through big tax cuts and public spending increases.

But the scale of this crisis is so large and its international reach so pervasive that it has not only prompted calls for a degree of emergency cooperation unprecedented in recent history. It has also raised demands that the world’s leaders should be working to try to prevent such a disaster from happening again.

It is fitting, perhaps, that the crucial phase of this crisis appears to have been reached as the world’s financial leaders gather at the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund in Washington.

The IMF was established six decades ago as a direct response by policymakers to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economic collapse that created the conditions for the Second World War. In July 1944, a group of economists, lawyers and bankers gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Led by John Maynard Keynes, they drafted a treaty that led to the establishment of the IMF and what later became the World Bank. More importantly, they agreed on a set of rules for the international exchange-rate system, to end the instability of the prewar years.

This week Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation, called for the creation of a new Bretton Woods system. Viewed from the wreckage of today’s system, it sounds like an appealing idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bretton Woods helped to produce a period of unparalleled stability and prosperity. Its collapse in the early 1970s was followed by a decade of inflation and, in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, a succession of financial crises.

Most economists agree, however, that a return to Bretton Woods today would be impractical. It would require the imposition of restrictions on the movement of capital that would choke off global growth. For all the misery of the present crisis, that free movement of capital has produced astonishing increases in wealth and income around the world in the past 25 years.

Although Bretton Woods itself could not be resurrected today, the principle of international financial cooperation at its core surely could.

Some form of global arrangement that produced new rules on international banking supervision and the assurance of adequate capital would reduce the risk of future financial collapse. Such a plan might also involve making permanent the sort of ad hoc arrangements being put together this weekend for an international guarantee of lending between banks.

As the past week has also reminded us, in these circumstances, international cooperation is not an optional extra.

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