What is love of one's country?

TO the hundred plus people who’ve passed through my First Year Seminar classes and/or my Religion and Science Fiction course and read (or pretended to read) The Left Hand of Darkness, the thing we talked about is now portrayed on a United States postal stamp and Ursula K. Le Guin, one of our realists of a higher reality, is being rightly honored by the government of “We, the people.” If you haven’t read this book, I’m sorry. Please get started as soon as possible. It appeared among us in 1969, and it is, I think, as good as literature gets. I want to avoid spoilers, but one of the characters portrayed in the above image is called Estraven, one of the most beautifully developed characters in the earth’s long chronicle. Estraven says extraordinary things like this:

How does one hate a country, or love one?…I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

See what I mean?