[By Duncan McLeod]

Last week’s WikiLeaks disclosure of US diplomatic cables is arguably the biggest international news story of 2010. But it could end up being a defining theme of 21st-century politics: the communications technology-driven decline of the nation state.

What gives governments the right to determine what information should be kept secret from us? On what basis do we trust our elected officials to decide what we should or should not know about what they’re up to?

These are questions that have been exercising my mind ever since the release of the cables. As far as I can tell, the leaks haven’t got anyone killed — at least not yet. Rather, they’ve only caused embarrassment for diplomats and politicians.

Should this supposedly sensitive information about diplomatic discussions and negotiations be public knowledge or kept from our eyes? I wonder.

The argument against WikiLeaks is that it’s posing a threat to national security, putting lives at risk. Fox News is filled with paranoid statements about how WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a threat to US security.

But this is arguing the point in favour of nation-state governments, which have come to assume they have an inalienable right to protect “society” from harm. Is that an assumption we should accept in the 21st century?

What exactly is “national security”? And how is it more important than the right of individuals to know what it is exactly that their governments are up to?

Most people, at least those in democratic nations, have come to trust their governments, at least some of the time, to look after their interests and protect them from harm. And they accept, for the most part, that this entails a degree of secrecy, of keeping information from them for their own security.

But should we allow this in an interconnected world? Does last century’s model of powerful nation-state governments make sense where technology has empowered individuals? Has the nation state become an anachronism in the information economy?

In 1997, former UK newspaper editor William Rees-Mogg and conservative excolumnist and investor James Dale Davidson wrote in their controversial book The Sovereign Individual about how the Internet would liberate individuals at the expense of the 20th-century nation state. Left-wing commentators pilloried the authors for their views. But 13 years later, the power of nation-state governments is arguably under sustained attack from individuals empowered by modern communications technology.

Much as the US and other governments would love to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s not going to happen. The genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Washington can declare cyber war on WikiLeaks, and it can do its best to hound and even arrest Assange. But it has no hope of stopping the free flow of information, short of getting the world to shut down the Internet (and, let’s face it, that’s not going to happen).

The main problem with WikiLeaks, as I see it, is that it’s going to force diplomats to become altogether more secretive in their dealings. They will no longer keep records of particularly sensitive discussions. And diplomatic cables will no longer be shared as widely as they are now. In short, there will be less to leak to WikiLeaks.

At the same time, though, the ongoing leaks — they will continue — will force governments to become more accountable for their actions. As any dictator knows, choking off the free flow of information is the surest way to cling to power. The Internet makes that almost impossible to do. Now WikiLeaks is helping people ask probing questions of even the most democratic of nation-state governments. And they don’t like it because their power is being eroded.

How they react will be telling.