The nation-state and the river: Spaces and times on Dutch rivers, 1795–1814

Nothing indeed demonstrates more forcefully the extent to which Dutch water management corresponds to the nature and the needs of the Dutch people and their land, and how it has emerged there from in a natural fashion than the fact that the revolutionaries of 1795, despite being so intoxicated by their unexpected victory and sudden power that they overturned everything ... nonetheless refrained from laying hands on institutions whose extreme antiquity would in those days have provided more of an excuse to abolish than to preserve them (J.W. Welcker, De Noorder-Lekdijk Bovendams en de doorsteking van den Zuider-Lekdijk bij Culemborg 1803–1813. Een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van den Nederlandschen Waterstaat geschetst en met onuitgegeven stukken toegelicht (‘s-Gravenhage: 1880), p. 2)

Delta Blues

The whirlwind that swept through the American media after the devastation of New Orleans last August was hardly less ferocious than Hurricane Katrina itself. The Corps of Engineers was lambasted for failing to defend the city against the floodwaters, while politicians from Mayor Ray Nagin to President George Bush were called to account for the tragically incompetent evacuation and relief efforts. Critics frequently drove their points home with invidious comparisons to the Netherlands. Flood control in the United States was fragmented, environmentally indifferent, callous about safety standards, and undermined by pork-barreling and deceitful contractors (so went the refrain); the Dutch, in contrast, were a nation of honest, clever, hardworking, technologically advanced Hans Brinkers

From sea to shining sea. Making ends meet on European rivers

This hopeful remark, written in 1920 by the German social critic Alfons Paquet, suggests that a ‘common spirit in Europe’ could ‘take the offensive’ in realizing waterways over both of Europe’s continental divides. As a German, Paquet conceived of these as extensions of the Rhine — via watershed-spanning canals into the basins of the Rhone and of the Danube. In this chapter I want to take a closer look at this ‘common spirit,’ particularly at whether it was merely an ideological pose to cloak what were essentially local or national projects in transcontinental European grandeur, or whether it was in fact a material force in promoting visions of such waterways and the projects to realize them. I will address this question by considering two visions of a waterway spanning the continental divide between the Rhine and Rhone basins. The first is the actually accomplished French Canal du Rhône au Rhin connecting the Rhine via the so-called ‘Burgundian Gate’ to the Rhone basin. The second is the envisioned, but never built, German–French–Swiss ‘transhelvetique’ over the Hochrhein via the River Aare and Geneva and on to the Haut Rhône. Both projects penetrate the ’European’ watershed dividing the Rhine and the Rhone, which can be held to ‘connect’ the North and Mediterranean Seas via a trans-European waterway, and thus provide an interesting comparison (See Figure 9.1). One was accomplished as an explicitly national project (though with European overtones) while the other was steeped in transnational imaginings from the first; one was a more or less routine challenge in hydraulic and political engineering while the other was dauntingly innovative in both respects