I agree with so much in Martha Nussbaum's well-argued and moving piece, but I would like to enter one caveat. Nussbaum sometimes seems to be proposing cosmopolitan identity as an alternative to patriotism. If so, then I think this is a mistake. And that is because we cannot do without patriotism in the modern world.

This necessity can be seen from two angles. The most important is this: the societies that we are striving to create -- free, democratic, willing to some degree to share equally -- require strong identification on the part of their citizens. It has always been noted in the civic humanist tradition that free societies, relying as they must on the spontaneous supportive action of their members, need that strong sense of allegiance that Montesquieu called "vertu." This is if anything even truer of modern representative democracies, even though they integrate "the liberty of the moderns" with the values of political liberty. Indeed, the requirement is stronger just because they are also "liberal" societies, which cherish negative liberty and individual rights. A citizen democracy can only work if most of its members are convinced that their political society is a common venture of considerable moment, and believe it to be of vital importance that they participate in the ways they must to keep it functioning as a democracy.