When the French politician Clemenceau visited Athens in 1899, he was taken on a tour of the city and briefed on the social, political, and economic problems facing both the city and the young Greek state. Afterwards, he addressed the local political and intellectual elites, starting his speech by exclaiming: ‘The best politician amongst you shall be the one who will bring water into Athens’ (Clemenceau 1899, cited in Gerontas and Skouzes 1963: in). Indeed, water supply was one of the most important and intricate political and social issues of the nineteenth century. Although water supply and management is today often presented as a purely technological and engineering problem, it remains, as we shall see, a deeply political issue, implicated in relations of social power (Reisner 1990; Postel 1992). Indeed, today, more than a century onwards from Clemenceau’s comment, his aphorism still holds true. Despite the fact that Western economies have undergone a period of ‘fierce modernization’ during the twentieth century, and despite technological advances and innovation, water supply and management remain major socio-technical issues at the heart of the political agenda (Bank 1992). Whilst contemporary Europe is not faced with severe water shortages (although many areas, particularly but not exclusively in the European South still face disruptions in water supply during dry months (ETC/IW 1996; ICWS 1996)), water supply and management remain amongst the most important political issues at the European and international level (Hundley 1992; Faure and Rubin 1993; Gleick 1993). Today, if anything, the political ecology of water has become more complex, and more important politically than in the nineteenth century. With the increasing internationalization and complexity of water resource management, with the emergence of an increasingly larger number of actors and institutions involved in this process, with the newly vested economic interests in water supply, and with the increasing concern and sensitivity towards environmental protection, if Clemenceau were alive today, he would probably maintain his aphorism— rephrasing it for the contemporary era: ‘The best politician amongst you shall be the one who will bring clean water into Europe, while keeping happy all the parties involved in water supply, use, and management, at the local, regional, national, and European level.’
Parish pump to private pipes: London's water supply in the nineteenth century
