“When everything goes well, it might look like you don’t need the nation state, but it turns out that when things become tough, that’s the only thing that you have,” said Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Thursday in Annenberg Auditorium.

The Center for Ethics in Society hosted Rodrik’s lecture, which was titled “Who Needs the Nation State?” and delivered as the annual Arrow Lecture on Ethics and Leadership.

During the presentation, Rodrik defended the concept of a nation state, which he defined as any smaller, self-governed body as contrasted to a global polity. He began by outlining key criticisms of the nation state, primarily those from fellow economists who emphasize the inefficiency of transaction costs caused by national borders, which impede global trade.

“This sort of looks like it’s hundred dollar bills lying on the proverbial pavement to the economists,” Rodrik said. “It means that we should basically pick up these hundred dollar bills by getting rid of nation states, getting rid of these jurisdictional boundaries, discontinuities in the global economy.”

Rodrik pointed to ethical arguments by “moral cosmopolitans,” who question the validity of national distinctions.

“It’s a totally artificial boundary,” Rodrik said, paraphrasing the arguments of his critics. “Moreover, it’s becoming more and more artificial in terms of improvements in communication and transportation technologies.”

Paradoxically, nation states both enable and impede globalization by providing the institutions required by global trade while introducing regulatory barriers, Rodrik said.

“This paradox requires us to manage the role of the nation state, to maintain this balance in a way, because the danger of trying to push markets beyond what the existing regulatory agents can support is that we get too much markets, too little governments, and therefore a lot of instability,” Rodrik said, highlighting the 2008 global financial collapse as evidence that nation states are required to pick up the pieces after economic crises.

“It was governments that stepped in to bail out the banks, to provide the safety nets and pump up demand and print the money,” Rodrik said. “Most typically, in the Euro Zone, we’ve seen how what seems to be a transnationalist project depends so much on the choices that individual nation states make, and ultimately all the responsibility for everything that has gone wrong — and for the little that has gone right — has been laid at the feet of national politicians.”

Earlier in the day, Rodrik spoke to eight students in Crothers Memorial Hall through the dorm’s Global Citizenship program, in a discussion moderated by Ishan Nath ’12.

Rodrik presented data showing that Europeans surveyed identified only slightly more as citizens of the European Union than as global citizens. The Euro Zone debt crisis was the topic of numerous audience queries in the question-and-answer session that followed Rodrik’s lecture.

“The fact that certainly Germans don’t feel they are the same political community as the Greeks — and that difference creates an apparently insurmountable obstacle to the creation of Europe-wide institutions, that makes the economic and financial integration projects unsustainable,” Rodrik said. “Europe is going through precisely the tensions that I’ve tried to identify here, and is doing it in a very vivid and real-time kind of fashion.”

One student audience member criticized both the event’s outreach.

“The talk was almost identical to other Ethics in Society events,” said audience member Joe Rivano Barros ’14. “Few students were in the audience, and fewer still were asking questions, with only faculty or gray-haired locals remotely engaging with the speaker.

“It was interesting that he didn’t really question the nation state as a construct,” he added, “but stuck to the question of the role of the nation state, given that it’s here to stay, in a globalized world.”