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You're right it CAN, but it doesn't always. If you're proud of a country you're more likely to want it to change for the better. I realize that in the US this is hard to see because generally when we think "patriot" we think gun-toting redneck, but on the international scale this isn't really true. I suppose it can be summed up with this quote for me:


War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.
[...]
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

-John Stuart Mill


And not necessarily like we always need to have a violent "war", but there needs to be people who care enough about their country that they're willing to fight for the change that needs to happen. You see how John Stuart Mill calls this lethargy the "degraded state of... patriotic feeling"? A true patriot wouldn't sit back when their country goes to s**t.

Nah nah. Look Canadians say 'eh' and hunt bears. They also like to beat each other up in ice rinks and best of all, unlike the USA, they delve into Rugby and, much to the bemusement of Anarcho and I, they also have a Cricket team.

Canada and Australia are blood brothers for life. <3<3

It could just be eleven mates at some pub in Ontario just sayin' 'Eh, ******** this s**t eh, lets go represent the flag'.

We do it in the winter Olympics lol

Rome's not really applicable, considering it's an entirely different system of economics than the modern sense. In that time, there could not have been internationalism.

In the case of the USSR, they were an entirely new nation that represented an ideology, rather than an ethnicity or a country. Just as for Romans the idea of Rome represented a comparatively just, prosperous, powerful, and civilized people, the USSR represented a community of vastly diverse people living in harmony as a single united people.
It's not entirely patriotism, but it's not dissimilar. Point noted, however, very intriguing idea... I always was fond of the Roman ideal, and to style a nation after that sort of espousing of principle's perhaps easier than consistently representing the entire sphere of communist views. The problem, however, with that sort of thinking is that when Rome made literature, drama, and military organization a specifically Roman virtue, it didn't exactly draw the Dacians into reading books and marching in formation. It just alienated them and made them instead despise civilization in general. So you run a very large risk by being patriotic about ideology. And, as in the case of Rome, people doubt your loyalty to those ideologies no matter what action you take.

How does a different system of economics limit the people of 509 BC from having feelings of nationalism? There were Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc. These people all felt they had a distinct nationality or whatever you want to call it, but when Romans started conquering Etruscan land they just made those Etruscans citizens of Rome. This was unheard of. You are right though, that you tread a very thin line with patriotic feeling because Rome eventually grew big enough to be an Empire and they stopped letting their conquests be citizens. They started putting themselves on pedestals. However this is a risk you run with any new form of government. It seems that inevitably the end result is very far from what the founders intended.

Because it was not historically possible. Humans can only set themselves up tasks that they can solve. Remember that: "The development of productive forces depend the relations into which people enter with one another in the production of things required for the satisfaction of human needs. These relations determine social life, human aspirations, ideas, and laws".

So pretty much depending on the prevailing mode of production at the time depends upon what ideas society generates. Nationalism did not arise until the nation-state existed which arose roughly around the time capitalism did. Now what distinguishes the nation-state from the empire or kingdom is of course the mode of production. The people in the latter identify with each other according to families, clans, villages, religions and regions due to the prevailing mode of production, whereas the people of a nation are joined together by a political philosophy, culture, language, common history, ethnicity and religion for the same reason.

The development of capitalism destroyed village ties by forcing masses of people to move into industrial centers for jobs. Village borders slowly more and more became erased. Science replaced religion in fields of study, the family unit became transformed. All of this a result of the mode of production at the time.

This is elementary Marxism Xion!

Touché. However, what date are you placing as the birth of capitalism? The Roman Empire definitely had elements of it, just as they had elements of democracy. And as previously stated, Rome for those nearly 600 years that it existed without being an Empire, was gathering people for its ideals. They were tied by political philosophy, that HEY we can rule ourselves!, by religion, etc.