[dogscoff]

I truly belive that you should consider your fellow citizens to be your brothers

The world would be a much happier place if people considered their fellow humans to be their brothers instead of just their countrymen. IMHO love of one's nation is a very dangerous thing. It's too easy to use it to generate hatred, and it's ridiculous when you consider the arbitrary nature of nationality anyway (I love my country and hate yours because I happened to be born here.)

What I'm abut to say may sound like a contradiction but it's not: I love my country.

I love my country because it contains my lifestyle, my family, my friends and a great many wonderful places. I don't think any other country could ever be home to me in quite the same way.
I would go to war if I thought my country were genuinely threatened, and I do what I can day by day to make it better. Not for patriotism though, but for the sake of the human beings who live here and the continuation of my way of life.

Nonetheless, I would give my country up in an instant if it turned foul or if peace/ humanity as a whole was better served that way. For this reason I remain open-minded about greater European integration and things like that whereas others oppose it simply because they think it means "the end of great britain".

The line I'm trying to draw is very hard to define, and I'm struggling, but it's basically the difference between loving a country as a place (which I do) and loving it as an entity (which I don't).

When you think about it, a nation is an abstract anyway. The borders on the map are just lines on paper, it's only in our heads and in our books that nations actually exist. I think that to cling to one nation for the sake of "patriotism" is absurd. To kill and die for it is terrible.

Mind you, as an atheist I think it's just as absurd killing and dying for "God", but we'd better not get into that.