It is roughly analagous, and it’s also not wrong. It’s simply language at work.
When people talk about “Washington” or “Moscow” passing a new law or signing a new treaty, we all know what they mean, just the same as when people talk about “The Pentagon” or “The Kremlin”. When the Vatican puts out a statement, we have no trouble saying that today “Rome” said such and such. When people grumble about “The Man” putting them down, we all know that they aren’t referring to an actual person.
Pars pro toto are inaccurate in a literal sense, but they’re not being used in a literal sense - they’re symbolic. They’re shorthand. They’re stand-ins. They’re representative of something. They have no obligation to literal reality, because they operate on the level of linguistic reality - of conceptual reality.
So when someone casually refers to The Netherlands as Holland, it’s not a goddamn attack on the collective pride of the Dutch. Getting bent out of shape over a pars pro toto out of some misplaced Nationalistic fervor is simply absurd - getting bent out of shape on the behalf of someone else who quite certainly doesn’t care is even more so.
