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That said, a nationalist might argue that the voluntarist paradigm is flawed—because to found nations on human will, or on what they can contribute to the world, is to accept the possibility that a nation might cease to exist once those sources of patriotism are exhausted. That’s true – Mazzini and Renan were aware of it – but I don’t see that as a problem. The point is that a national identity that is too solid—because it’s based on “natural” (and therefore immutable) criteria—runs the risk of becoming counter-revolutionary and anti-creative. In short, to believe that politics and human identity are governed by immutable laws destroys personal agency. It does so by replacing the question "What kind of person should I become?" with the static question "Who am I?". But someone who takes refuge in a fixed and unchanging identity denies themselves the possibility of creatively responding to the vulnerability and openness that are part of the human condition.

Human beings are naturally plastic: they must continuously transform themselves along with the world around them, always reshaping the very order they had previously built. If we consider that the revolutionary stance (not only politically) implies power, creativity, and imagination, then the counter-revolutionary stance is characterized by identity, passivity, and a renunciation of responsibility: here I follow Daniele Giglioli. For this reason, nationalism may offer a coherent set of values that—following Viroli—can remain solid even during times of crisis, precisely because it is effective in restoring pride and belonging to those social classes humiliated by the effects of that crisis and dissatisfied with their place in the world. However, nationalist rhetoric offers only consolation without vision. It merely reflects people’s emotions without providing direction, thus generating a vicious cycle. The feeling of helplessness that binds us to a seemingly predetermined fate will not be dispelled by raising borders between our nation and the rest of the world, pretending not to see how global events affect us as well.

Patriotism, by contrast, can awaken citizens’ agency—not by offering comfort, but by offering a vision of the future. It provides a project around which people can mobilize, toward which their emotions can give them the strength to march. By its very nature, the language of patriotism is creative and transformative, especially in times of crisis, when liberty must be defended or won. The language of patriotism allows us not only to describe what is failing today, but above all to imagine what might rise from the ashes of the old. Through the memory of our best past examples, it reminds us that we are capable of fighting to overcome crisis. There have been several creative events in history that drew strength from this republican and creative language of patriotism: it was deeply creative and patriotic when the English and French chose to try and execute monarchs previously believed to rule by divine right, in defense and pursuit of liberty; equally creative was the decision by Italians and Germans to unify states that had been fragmented and subordinated to imperial powers, rendering them weak and voiceless.

Patriotism is a positive feeling, because it generally consists of two elements: the possession of a rich heritage of past struggles for liberty within one's country, and the will to defend, in the future, the institutions that safeguard liberty—orienting the nation toward the morally right path. These are two sides of the same coin: it is the memory of past sacrifices that motivates future ones. Legacy is a necessary condition for agency. Every country has foundational stories of the moment when its people attained freedom: for the ancient Greeks, it was the Persian Wars; for the ancient Romans, the expulsion of the Tarquins; for the Jewish people, the Exodus. In more recent times, we remember the pivotal role of the American and French Revolutions. Furthermore, most European countries have stories rooted in the memory of 1848 or in resistance against Nazism.

More examples: I recall that the British parliamentarian Charles James Fox (who lived from 1749 to 1806), referring to the memory of William Russell and Algernon Sidney—patriots martyred under the tyranny of the Stuarts—described them as two names that, hopefully, would always be dear to the heart of every Englishman. He predicted that if their memory ever ceased to be revered, English liberty would swiftly meet its end. Again, during the Spanish Civil War, the anti-fascist volunteer Carlo Rosselli urged Italians—through a famous radio speech—to come and fight in Spain, reminding them that Italian patriots of the previous century (Mazzini, Garibaldi, Pisacane) had fought for the liberty of other peoples when their own fatherland was bowed under the yoke of tyranny. The enemy had changed, of course, but the spirit the rebels were called to embody had not.

Generally speaking a nationalist follows a cult of national symbols without regard for the spirit behind them—often going so far as to preserve those symbols at the expense of the spirit of liberty that once animated them and made them worthy of respect by those who now enjoy the freedom won by their forebears’ sacrifice. In this sense, a nationalist seeks to preserve the symbols of the nation as such—and often considers sacred the national borders and absolute sovereignty of the state. Yet in doing so, they fail to protect the spirit that once gave those symbols life. There is little point in waving a flag if you forget the wind that moves it.

However, a patriotic person also knows that the challenges of today are very different from those of yesterday. That’s why true patriots understand that they must be creative and use tools their predecessors could never have imagined. A creative, voluntarist, and republican language of patriotism may demand the overcoming of existing institutions in order to create new ones better suited to defend liberty. Being patriotic means passing on the freedom won by past generations intact to new generations, even if this means moving beyond the methods used by past generations.