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This will be remembered as the week it turned ugly.

It wasn't the anger: That was sensible. Given that more than 70,000 people in North America and Europe lost their jobs in a single day the previous Monday — and the nine working days that followed have not been much better — it's perfectly reasonable for people to take to the streets in France, Britain, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and Switzerland.

After all, most major Western governments had spent the previous 15 years re-engineering their unemployment-insurance and social-assistance systems to suit a sustained period of full employment, when new jobs can be found quickly.

Those systems, including Canada's, are pitifully ill-suited to keeping households from collapsing in ruin during a sudden moment of mass unemployment.

It's especially unforgivable to offer so little at a time when governments know they should be dumping great sums of money into the economy to revive consumption. Giving it to unemployed workers, who pretty much have to spend it right away, is a better form of stimulus than many of the others being tried.

The ugliness, however, manifested itself when the anger suddenly turned against outsiders. Phrases like "Buy American" and "British jobs for British workers," which gained popularity because they seem to reflect a deeper sentiment, are chillingly redolent of earlier moments, in 1873 and 1930, when economic depressions morphed into fierce moments of nationalist self-defence and attacks on outsiders, leading to isolationism, racism and war.

This time, there is a level of awareness of these awful precedents. The British workers who held a nationwide string of illegal walkouts against the presence of "foreign" (Italian and Portuguese) workers on the job site of a French-owned British oil refinery were chastened on Tuesday after the fascist British National Party showed up to support the strikes and had to be sent packing.

That led Derek Simpson, a head of the Unite union, to make the much more reasonable statement that the strike "is not about race or immigration," but rather "it's about employers who exploit workers, regardless of their nationality, by undercutting their hard-won pay and conditions."

That's a more serious problem, and with luck the union's attention will be focused on it, rather than on supposed outsiders. The "foreign" workers were allowed to continue working.

I put "foreign" between quotes because there's nothing foreign about those Italian and Portuguese workers. There hasn't been since 1973, when Britain joined the European Community, two decades before it was the European Union, and gained the right to have its workers recognized as full citizens when they work in any other member country.

Currently, there are 1.5 million Britons living in other European countries, perhaps half of them working full-time and taking advantage of this.

(It's the sort of clause that the North American Free Trade Agreement would have included if it had been negotiated by broader-minded people.)

In exchange, British companies must pay "foreign" workers at least the British minimum wage, currently $10.30. It makes as much sense for British workers to complain as it would if Albertans protested against the flood of Newfoundlanders working in Fort McMurray.

In the U.S. case, as we all know, the "buy American" bill, which filtered up from the Rust Belt states through the House of Representatives and caused immediate horror among Canadian and European leaders, would allow immediate retaliation under the World Trade Organization and NAFTA pacts, destroying the U.S. ability to save its economy through exports.

Still, more alarming things are in the works: On Thursday, Senators Bernie Sanders and Charles Grassley launched a bill that would forbid bailed-out banks from hiring foreign workers.

There are two things to be said about these brief explosions. One is that they are totally senseless, because this is an international problem. The other is that they are completely understandable, because the problem requires national measures.

Recessions and depressions are international in cause — especially this one, which is not a crisis of capitalism but rather a crisis of finance, one without borders. And their solutions must ultimately be international: No one country, acting alone, can get finance markets moving again.

Countries such as Germany and to some extent Canada, which have tried to see through the crisis by doing little and becoming "free riders" on the far larger bailouts of other countries, have learned that this doesn't work. It drags everyone else down. And countries such as the U.S., which have enormous trade and current-account deficits, can get out of this mess only by raising exports.

But the pathways to this international solution run through individual countries. The fiscal and monetary tools are almost all national in nature (the European Central Bank is an exception), the people who are answerable are all national politicians and, before it's over, we're going to have to see a lot of nationalizing of national companies by national governments.

Can you really blame workers, then, for adopting nationalist positions?

The precedent to watch is not 1930 but the even-worse crisis of 57 years earlier. The period beginning in 1873, economist Eric Janszen says, was "one of broad-based public participation in credit-financed, asset-price inflation and speculation. When the commercial real-estate market crashed, it took down the banks and caused the market for commercial credit to seize up."

In other words, exactly what happened in 2008.

"Unemployment spiked and a severe and lengthy depression ensued as financial markets throughout the world suffered, followed by international trade. … It was the beginning of the end of Europe's dominance as the centre of global economic power."

This was when the "foreign worker" and the "job-stealing immigrant" first became political tropes, and sometimes major movements. Remember, passports and border controls weren't invented until the First World War, and most Western workers then were "immigrants."

But the pressure on national governments, acting alone, created an insular culture of outsider-blaming, one that spread to the larger community and was the reason why that downturn is known today as the 20-year "long depression."

Let's not allow that to happen again.

Editor's Note: The newspaper version of this column and the earlier online version of this article incorrectly identfied NAFTA as the "North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement." This online version has been corrected.