PARIS — You would never know from his demeanor that Yanis Varoufakis, the celebrity Greek finance minister, was carrying the weight of a nation on his shoulders. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was his country’s uncompromising creditors who were on the defensive.

On Thursday, at a conference of economic luminaries, Mr. Varoufakis was working hard to divert the discussion from Greece’s shrinking financial freedom and fears that it might default. (He had a bit of wind at his back with news that Greece on this same day had just met its deadline for repaying a €460 million, or $491 million, loan installment to the International Monetary Fund.)

Rather than concede any Greek missteps, Mr. Varoufakis wanted to assess the flaws of the eurozone that he said had been revealed by the 2008 global meltdown and its aftermath.

“There is no doubt that if we had a federal republic, if we had a United States of Europe, we would not be here discussing the Greek crisis, the eurozone crisis, banking union or anything of the sort,” he said in an onstage conversation with the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, at a conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. “Unfortunately,” he added, “the way we designed the eurozone, it was crying out for a crisis.”