Catholics, competition, and patriotism

The other day, I came across this paper, "Our Anticompetitive Patriotism," by Professor Todd Pettys.  Here is the abstract:

This article examines the profound regulatory implications of Americans' deep, quasi-religious devotion to their nation. I argue that Americans' powerful identification with their country poses a significant threat to the system of intergovernmental competition that the Framers envisioned. The Framers believed that the state and federal governments would compete with one another for citizens' loyalty and for the regulatory power which that loyalty often yields, and that this competition would give both sovereigns strong incentives to remain finely attuned to the needs and desires of the citizenry. I contend that the nation's seemingly exclusive claim to citizens' patriotism significantly shields the federal government from the competitive forces that the Framers believed would restrain its ability to govern in objectionable ways. I conclude by advancing a two-part argument. First, to ensure that the federal government does not wield monopolistic power in a vast array of domains, we should give increased consideration to treaties and other regulatory alternatives that require America's leaders to negotiate with their counterparts in other countries. Second, in the years ahead, Americans may very well develop the supra-national patriotic sentiments necessary to sustain such models of international governance.

It is an interesting point:  The Framers (some of them anyway -- certainly Alexander Hamilton hoped that national loyalty would win out) expected that citizens' loyalties to their own states would facilitate competition between the states and the federal government, and among the states themselves.  Pettys notes that Americans' "quasi-religous" devotion to their *nation* throws a wrench in the competitive-federalism works.  It is probably also part of the story that Americans are much more mobile than ever that, increasingly, most places feel, look, and regulate like most others. 

To be a Catholic, I suppose, is to be "cosmopolitan," in the sense that we have been baptized into a community that is bigger than, and prior to, with larger purposes than, any nation, including our own.  At the same time, to be Catholic is to understand and appreciate the importance to human flourishing of rootedness-in-community, of mediating institutions, of subsidiarity, etc.  Probably, membership in the universal Church is not what Pettys has in mind when he speaks of "supra-national patriotic sentiments".  I wonder, *should* we want Catholics to develop such sentiments?  Or, at the present moment, is it at least as important for all of us to re-discover sub-national "patriotic" sentiments?  Or, is that even possible?