Roger Scruton died just over six years ago. (I can’t believe it’s been that long myself.)
From a speech he gave at an Acton Institute event a decade ago:
This law-governed society is made possible because we know who we are and define our identity — not by our religion, our tribe, or our race — but by our country, the place where our man-made law prevails, the sovereign territory in which we have built the free form of life that we share.
This sovereign territory is our home, and it is in terms of it that our public duties are defined. We may have religious and family duties too, but they are private duties, not incumbent on the citizenry as a whole. Our public duties are defined by the secular law, and by the customs and institutions that have grown alongside it. . . . It seems to me that the national identity that I, as an Englishman, have inherited — the identity of a nation joined in a union of like-minded nations in a single sovereign territory — is far more robust than its detractors assume, and that it has, like the American identity, a remarkable capacity to absorb incomers and to integrate them by a process of mutual adaptation. But we can adapt to the effects of inward migration only if migration is controlled, and only if we are allowed to affirm our identity in the face of it, so as to renew our obedience to the institutions and customs that define us.
In other words, the global processes that challenge us now are reasons to affirm national sovereignty and not to repudiate it. For national sovereignty defines what we are.
Shared law, in a shared territory — over time makes a nation.