Most parents rightfully associate birthday party theme packages with throwing parties for children. The collections usually contain pictures of national
http://sqworl.com flag, national symbols, record books on historical events and, remarkable, fascinating patriotic images, photos of historical places of a country, autobiographies of nation's historic leaders, heroes and influential personalities.
It abuses neither speech nor sense to say that I love my house and for that reason would feel sorrow and deprivation if disaster forced me to leave it. (I have had such an experience.) A country is, among other things, a place, a language (one's mother tongue"), a way of life, and a set of institutions through which collective decisions are made and carried out.
To Americans, they are on top of the world, untouchable and the best at everything they do. There's a certain arrogance that they'll refuse to accept anything negative directed at them, either individually, or as a nation, and I expect that if this post reaches a few of them, there may be a few comments showing exactly that.
In the cosmopolitan conception, nationality is seen as another deep contingency that is as sex or race morally arbitrary and therefore the criteria of justice cannot be limited by them. Patriotism is love of country, and we should delight in celebrating our democracy, individual freedoms, diverse culture, stunning landscapes and, as the song says, fruited plains.
Although political formations emerged on other continents in the twentieth and sometimes (most notably in Latin America) even the nineteenth century that called themselves ‘nations', they arose in altogether different civilisational settings with entirely different cultural traditions.