Liquid Power by Erik Swyngedouw: Water, Power and Modernisation

Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain (2015) is the book in which the Belgian geographer Erik Swyngedouw, a professor at the University of Manchester, explains how water became in Spain the central instrument of a modernisation project that cut across opposing political regimes. His thesis is that dams, canals and water transfers are not just engineering works but power relations made material: they decide who receives water, who pays for it, which territories prosper and which are flooded or dried out. Understanding water as liquid power is understanding how modern Spain was built and why its water conflicts remain open.

Regenerationism: Joaquín Costa and hydraulic policy

Swyngedouw locates the origin in the regenerationism of the late nineteenth century. After the disaster of 1898, intellectuals such as Joaquín Costa proposed regenerating the country through hydraulic policy: if Spain was poor because it was dry, geography had to be corrected with reservoirs and irrigation. That idea, summed up in the slogan of school and larder, united liberals, conservatives and republicans in a technical project that promised to overcome politics through engineering. The National Plan of Hydraulic Works of 1933, under the Second Republic, was its first complete formulation.

Francoism and the spectacle of dams

Francoism inherited that programme and turned it into propaganda. Between 1939 and 1975 the regime built hundreds of dams and multiplied the irrigated area, and Franco personally inaugurated so many reservoirs that popular humour nicknamed him Paco Rana, Frank the Frog. Swyngedouw shows how hydraulics served at once to produce energy and food, to settle colonists in newly built villages and to stage a power that mastered nature. Behind the spectacle, thousands of families were expelled from flooded valleys with little compensation, and water was distributed according to hierarchies that favoured large landowners and industry.

From the Ebro transfer to the New Water Culture

Democracy did not break with the hydraulic paradigm but reformulated it. Swyngedouw analyses the National Hydrological Plan of 2001, which projected transferring water from the Ebro to the Mediterranean coast, and the mobilisation that defeated it: Aragon and Catalonia against Valencia and Murcia, environmentalists against irrigators, the New Water Culture against traditional engineering. The plan was repealed in 2004 and replaced by desalination plants, but the conflict showed that water remains the ground on which development models, regional identities and the relationship between the state and its territories are contested.

Hydrosocial cycle and the depoliticisation of water

The book's theoretical framework is the urban political ecology Swyngedouw has developed since the 1990s. The water that reaches a city's tap is the result of a hydrosocial cycle in which nature and society cannot be separated: rain, reservoir, pipe, tariff and law form a single process. That process produces winners and losers, and the technical discourse that presents it as neutral, rational management, efficiency, hides the political decisions it contains. Swyngedouw calls this the depoliticisation of water, and his book is an effort to repoliticise it.

Liquid Power matters beyond Spain because the model it describes has been repeated worldwide: the great dams of the twentieth century, from the United States to China and from Egypt to Brazil, followed the same logic of modernisation through mastery of water. In the age of climate change, with longer droughts and more violent rains, Swyngedouw's question is more urgent: who decides about water, with what interests and for whom. The cities that today restore rivers or debate their tariffs are, without knowing it, reopening the debate the book reconstructs.