Technonatural revolutions: the scalar politics of Franco's hydro‐social dream for Spain, 1939–1975

Abstract

In this paper, I seek to document and substantiate the notion of the production of socio‐natures by elaborating how Spain's modernization process after the Civil War became a deeply and very specific scalar geographical project, articulated through the production of a specific technonatural hydraulic edifice. I shall focus on the momentous transformation of the hydraulic environment during the Franco period (1939–1975) and seek to reformulate Spain's socio‐hydraulic reconstruction in the context of a double and partly contradictory ‘scalar’ politics. Two theoretically interrelated arguments guide this endeavour. On the one hand, Franco's ideological‐political mission was predicated upon national territorial integration, the eradication of regionalist or autonomist aspirations, and a concerted discursive and physical process of cultural and material national(ist) homogenization and modernization. On the other, the production of the technonatural material infrastructures of this modernizing programme was predicated upon re‐scaling the ‘networks of interest’ on which Franco's power rested from a national visionary to an internationalist geo‐economic and geo‐political imagination, articulated through Spain's integration in the US‐led Western Alliance.

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