ABSTRACT
The Mediterranean may be, as I suggest in the initial chapter of this book, a region of imagined unity, but one thing all the authors in this volume reiterate is that the countries that border the Mediterranean Sea are confronted with a severe crisis of fresh water resources. Each country’s approach to the crisis, even if that nation is a member of the EU, is different, and conditioned not only by the particularities of its environment, but by cultural attitudes as much as by local political and economic conditions. Spain and Greece, two EU counties that face severe water problems, might be expected to have common approaches to the water crisis, yet, as Gaspar Mairal points out, public policy has deep cultural roots, and in Spain the issue of water acquired Biblical dimensions in the 19th century in strong contrast to Greece, where water was never a central issue of national policy.
