10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11647
This short essay gives an overview of an academic expertise that lies at the crossroads of different historical subfields. It explains how the Department of History and Politics at the University of Bologna has introduced the author to the core tenets of classical political and international history. It also shows how other international academic environments place an emphasis on bottom-up approaches. The combination of these two approaches is ideal to explore the development of cold war's transatlantic relations through the experiences of organized social movements and assess their political effectiveness as well.
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People's Histories of the US Empire: A Trans-Local Approach to Study the Environment and the Cold War
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11647                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




People’s Histories of the US Empire: A Trans-Local Approach to
                       Study the Environment and the Cold War

                                                    Dario Fazzi

                                            Published: November 10, 2020



                                                      Abstract

       This short essay gives an overview of an academic expertise that lies at the crossroads of different
       historical subfields. It explains how the Department of History and Politics at the University of
       Bologna has introduced the author to the core tenets of classical political and international history.
       It also shows how other international academic environments place an emphasis on bottom-up
       approaches. The combination of these two approaches is ideal to explore the development of cold
       war’s transatlantic relations through the experiences of organized social movements and assess their
       political effectiveness as well.
       Keywords: Cold War; US Empire; Base Politics; Transnationalism; Environmental History.




Dario Fazzi: Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (Netherlands)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8348-9483
 d.fazzi@roosevelt.nl;  https://www.roosevelt.nl/staff/dario-fazzi
Dario Fazzi is Senior Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, the Nether-
lands. His research focuses on the interplay between US social and foreign policy history. He is interested in
social movements’ impact on US cold war relations as well as on US empire’s global environmental footprint.
His main fields of expertise lie in peace history, transnational history, and environmental history, but he en-
joys envirotech and political ecology approaches too. He is the author of Eleanor Roosevelt and the Anti-Nuclear
Movement: The Voice of Conscience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and has edited collections, published
articles, contributed chapters, and written reviews on nuclear culture and policymaking, peace movements, youth
protests, modern environmentalism, base politics, and transatlantic crossings. Currently, he is working on a book
on ocean incineration.



Copyright © 2020 Dario Fazzi                                                                                          97
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Environment and the Cold War                                                                        USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




     The Cold War is among the most-researched topics in twentieth century history. Generations
of historians have scrutinized it thoroughly and adding further nuances to the narration of it is, per
se, a daunting task. Yet, scholars keep reinterpreting, rescaling, and reframing it in numerous ways.1
Enticed by this challenge, when I started my PhD program in Bologna back in 2007 I was hoping that
my thesis could contribute to expanding our understanding of Cold War dynamics. My project aimed
at narrating the early stages of the nuclear arms race from the point of view of those who opposed
it. While conceding all the imperfections of a rudimentary, acerbic study, I wanted to assess to what
extent the early protests against nuclear testing actually built a compelling anti-nuclear conscience that
eventually enabled the Cold War to remain, at least for what concerned an all-out nuclear exchange,
cold.
     Ambitiously titled The Hot Peace, the dissertation ended up focusing on British and American 1950s
and 1960s anti-nuclear protests. It combined two different perspectives. A first section was devoted
to the analysis of a decade-long scientific dissent, which opened the debate on nuclear power to the
wider public so to expose the hazards of nuclear fallout. In so doing, anti-nuclear scientists, either
individually or through organized efforts like the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs,
challenged their governments’ official narratives. A second section addressed how social movements
and organized groups eventually endorsed scientists’ appeals to “leave folly and to face reality” and
gave this mounting dissent full body and shape.2 The coalescence of public unease about the nuclear
arms race both in the US ad in the UK led to the mushrooming of a plethora of liberal, religious,
and radical anti-nuclear organizations. The joint efforts of anti-nuclear “science” and “street,” thus,
induced governments to moderate their stances on nuclear testing, a strategic switch that resulted in
moratoriums as well as in international bans. More importantly, my thesis argued, those protests left
a symbolic legacy — I called it an “anti-nuclear conscience” — that throughout the Cold War sustained
and reinforced what Nina Tannenwald defines as a “nuclear taboo,” that is the long-standing tradition
of non-use of nuclear weapons.3
     Such a research allowed me to publish journal articles and book chapters on anti-nuclear culture,
peace movements, and transnational protests, win two postdoctoral positions, and write my first book,
a monograph focusing on US first lady and diplomat Eleanor Roosevelt.4 Titled Eleanor Roosevelt and
the Anti-Nuclear Movement: The Voice of Conscience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), that book
represented the first organic assessment of Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence over the early Cold War anti-
nuclear dissent and explored the progressive mainstreaming of anti-nuclear discourses throughout
the 1950s and early 1960s.
     My initial research lay at the crossroad between political and cultural and social history. This was
all but coincidental. I had been exposed to the traditional canons and paradigms of political history
during my PhD training at the University of Bologna. My interests progressively shifted toward in-
formal transatlantic exchanges and transnationalism once I settled in the Netherlands, working as a
research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies. The combination of these two meth-
ods came to typify my research mostly though a tendency to privilege bottom-up approaches in order
to explore (US) politics and policies.


1.   Among the most recent analyses challenging Cold War’s traditional paradigms, see Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A
     World History. New York: Basic Books, 2017, Petra Goedde, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. New York: Oxford
     University Press, 2019, and Lorenz M. Lüthi, Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press,
     2020.

2.   See Lawrence S. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford: Stanford
     University Press, 2009, 156.

3.   Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945. New York: Cambridge
     University Press, 2007.

4.   Dario Fazzi, “The Blame and the Shame: Kennedy’s Choice to Resume Nuclear Tests in 1962,” Peace & Change, 1 (2014); Id.,
     “A Voice of Conscience: How Eleanor Roosevelt Helped to Popularize the Debate on Nuclear Fallout,1950-1954,” Journal
     of American Studies, 3 (2016): 1-32; Id., “The Nuclear Freeze Generation: The Early 1980s Anti-nuclear Movement between
     ‘Carter’s Vietnam’ and ‘Euroshima’,” in A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements
     in the 1980s, eds. Knud Andresen and Bart van der Steen (New York: Palgrave, 2016); Id., “The Nuclear Freeze: Transna-
     tional Pursuit of Positive Peace,” in The Routledge History of World Peace since 1750, eds. Christian Philip Peterson, William M.
     Knoblauch, and Michael Loadenthal. London: Routledge, 2018.



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Environment and the Cold War                                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




    This broad interest in people’s histories is what inspires and binds together my current research
projects as well. The first one is about the social, cultural, economic, and environmental impact that US
military bases have had in continental Europe throughout the Cold War. This comparative research
conjoins different historical subfields and is meant to contextualize Europe’s Americanization both
thematically and geographically. More specifically, the aim of this work is to offer an analysis of US
overseas bases’ sustainability and adaptability to the local surroundings. My other ongoing research
project is meant to provide the very first historical overview of the so-called “at-sea incineration,” a
practice for the oceanic disposal of hazardous industrial waste that was launched in the late 1960s and
abandoned in the early 1990s. Enticed by a process that promised to solve one of modern industrial
system’s most upsetting paradoxes — maintaining high productivity without negatively affecting the
environment — several Western governments enthusiastically supported ocean incineration through
both domestic legislation and international agreements. Such an unscrupulous attitude, as my re-
search emphasizes, changed dramatically when the public turned its attention to ocean incineration’s
broader environmental footprint. The emergence of a wave of transnational protests, my book will
argue, spelled the end of this practice.



1 The US Among Us
Outposts of empire or beacons of freedom? Scholars have considered American military bases over-
seas both ways. Particularly in Western Europe, the exceptionally long-lasting deployment of Amer-
ican military forces has been usually regarded as strategically instrumental to contain Communism
and strengthen a system of collective security. US bases in Europe have been interpreted mostly
as a projection of American hegemony and the embodiment of the American empire.5 These lines
of inquiry have been first explored by Robert Harkavy in his works on “access diplomacy,” and by
Alexander Cooley, who has defined such dynamics as “base politics.”6 These concepts interpret the
American military presence abroad substantially as a function of geostrategic ends. Studies of this
sort have placed a great emphasis on the diverse US national interests that overseas bases have been
able to serve. According to these views, Washington’s base politics has been used in varying degrees to
exert influence over riotous allies, improve comparative positioning at the international level, secure
access to vital communications, commodities, raw materials and trade routes, and even to wage psy-
chological warfare.7 Most of the time, these studies have also correctly highlighted the asymmetrical
nature of the bilateral Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), the treaties granting and regulating the
access of US military personnel to foreign soil, which have played a pivotal role in the outcome of
American military positioning overseas.8
    Traditional nation-based studies and top-down approaches have had the merit to illuminate the
politics concerning the establishment and the preservation of a network of American bases in Europe.


5.   See Josef Joffe, The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States, and the Burden of Alliance. Pensacola: Ballinger, 1987; David P.
     Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony, The Future of the Western Alliance. New York: Basic Books, 1987; Simon Duke and Wolfgang
     Krieger, eds., U.S. Military Forces in Europe: The Early Years, 1945–1970. New York: Westview Press, 1993; Christopher T.
     Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Geir Lundestad, The
     United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift. New York: Oxford University
     Press, 2005; Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan
     Books, 2005; Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Boston: MIT Press,
     2011; Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History, 3 (2016):
     373-91; Brooke L. Blower, “A Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic
     History, 3 (2017): 439-59.

6.   Robert E. Harkavy, Great Power Competition for Overseas Bases: The Geopolitics of Access Diplomacy. New York: Pergamon Press,
     1982 and Id., Bases Abroad: The Global Foreign Military Presence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Alexander Cooley,
     Base Politics: Democratic Change and the U.S. Military Overseas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

7.   Dan Smith, Pressure: How America Runs NATO. London: Bloomsbury, 1989; Carnes Lord, ed., Reposturing the Force: U.S.
     Overseas Presence in the Twenty-First Century. Newport: Naval War College Press, 2006; Alexander Cooley, Hendrik Spruyt,
     Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

8.   Andrew I. Yeo, “Security, Sovereignty, and Justice in U.S. Overseas Military Presence,” International Journal of Peace Studies,
     2 (2014): 43-67; Alexander Cooley, Base Politic.



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Environment and the Cold War                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




On the other hand, they have left US outposts’ broader impact largely outside of the light cone. In
other words, classical political studies have overlooked the intricate relationships between US military
personnel abroad and local hosting communities. In so doing, these analyses have failed to appre-
ciate how these relationships have changed over time and space, and to what extent they have been
conditioned by a set of preexisting local social norms, cultural habits, and institutions.
    My project contributes to filling this gap. It draws on a recent historiographic trend that focuses
on the socio-cultural impact of many “little Americas” spread all over the world. Donna Alvah, Anni
Baker, Cynthia Enloe, Maria Höhn, and David Vine, among others, have interpreted the American
military bases overseas as agents of public diplomacy, implicitly referring to what US historian Emily
Rosenberg called “transnational currents.”9 These scholars have demonstrated that US soldiers serving
abroad along with their families, have disseminated typical elements of the American lifestyle, acting
as “unofficial ambassadors” for their government, and challenging the traditional class, gender, racial,
and power relationships of their surroundings.
    My aim is to complements these works in two ways. First, by broadening their scope through
an analysis of the US bases’ economic and environmental sustainability. Secondly, by offering a new
geographical perspective. Whereas the existent literature tends to concentrate on large installations
such as Ramstein, Okinawa or Diego Garcia, my project focuses instead on smaller military outposts
— the so-called “lily pads” — under the assumption that it is in these tiny, local, experiences that the
overall cultural, economic and environmental impact of the US presence is at its most visible and
easiest to appreciate. US military “lily pads” have favored the installation and replication of a number
of varied cross-cultural encounters, which have included mixed marriages, the organization of joint
events and projects, and the blending of habits ranging from gastronomic traditions to public holidays
and celebrations; they have also brought in fresh money, created new jobs, built infrastructures, and
favored both public and private investments; finally they have increased soil, water, air and noise
pollution, affected the local waste treatment and energy supplies, altered morphology, interfered with
urban development and planning, and jeopardized public health and wild life. My study will reckon
with the totality of such an exogenous impact on local communities throughout continental Europe.
    My case-studies come from four different European countries, namely the Netherlands, Belgium,
Italy and Germany. I chose these countries for a few different reasons. First, in these nations a set
of democratic institutions have regulated political, social and cultural interactions; in addition, all the
case-studies come from non-English speaking nations, where local communities have had to deal with
linguistic barriers; finally, in these countries the presence of American bases has been uninterrupted
throughout the Cold War and beyond. Such a comparative analysis is useful if we are to assess both
the positive and negative dynamics set in motion by the American military presence in Europe, and
we intend to clarify whether the American military interference at a local level confirms or denies
national patterns of adaptation or, by converse, rejection to it. Furthermore, my project’s glocal per-
spective helps to understand how the global and local dimensions have constantly interacted with each
other, and contributes to narrowing the chasm between macro-and micro-history through a focus on
ordinary people that introduces the everyday life into the historical inquiry of the American empire.10


9.   Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965, New York: New York
     university Press, 2007; Anni P. Baker, American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence. Westport: Greenwood, 2004;
     Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: university of California
     Press, 1989; Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to
     the Present. Durham: Duke university Press, 2010; David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America
     and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015. Other scholars have been focusing on the social turmoil generated
     by American bases in Europe, see for instance Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard, eds., The Sun Never Sets … Confronting
     the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases. Boston: South End Press, 1991; Catherine Lutz, The Bases of Empire: The Global
     Struggle against US Military Posts. New York: New York University Press, 2009; Elsa Rassbach, “Protesting U.S. Military
     Bases in Germany,” Peace Review, 2 (2010): 121-27; Amy Austin Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and
     Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. On the concept of “transnational currents,” see Emily S. Rosenberg,
     A World Connecting 1870–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012 and Id., Transnational Currents in a Shrinking
     World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

10. On the importance of the “everyday life” in history, see Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Civilization and
    Capitalism 15th–18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 29 and Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday
    Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.



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Environment and the Cold War                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




    Finally, due to its pronounced cultural dimension, my project aims to become a benchmark in the
decade-long debate about the Americanization of European societies. Rob Kroes’ seminal work on the
reception of the American cultural model in Europe rightly recognizes that Americanness has been
usually mediated through “every form of American presence” but rests mainly on “mythical images”
of the United States.11 The aleatory nature of these images, which have been ingrained in the collec-
tive mind through a process of national adaptation — cultural studies and postmodern anthropology
refer to this process as creolization or hybridization — has led many scholars to deem the concept of
Americanization itself of dubious analytic value. Americanization has been stigmatized as an expe-
dient “created by Europeans … to explain how their societies have changed in ways they don’t like.”12
Against such a “not like us” attitude, my project proposes instead an “among us” analysis that, through
a focus on US military lily pads, can bridge the divide between the flow of ideas and their spatial and
temporal immediacy. In so doing, my project will combine the “mythical images” of the US with
concrete empirical references, and will place such a mutual and complex Circum-Atlantic exchange,
within spatially-defined experiences.13



2 Smoke on the Water
This research project aims to provide the first historical account of the public outcry over ocean incin-
eration, a method for the disposal of hazardous industrial waste initiated in the late 1960s, developed
in the mid-1970s, boomed in the early 1980s, and eventually phased out from the 1990s onward.14
    The petrochemical industry fueled the postwar reconstruction and boosted mass consumption.
In the postwar years, plastic came to be the very emblem of affluent society. But disposable progress
came at a cost: the generation of millions of tons of hazardous waste a year. Up until the 1970s, this
was not regarded as a problem, and most of the hazardous industrial waste, including the residues
of metal, paper, pharmaceutical, machinery, glass, and nuclear production, was either incinerated
and stockpiled inland, or simply dumped at sea. The emergence of a widespread environmental
consciousness in the 1970s gave urgency to the safe treatment of this waste. Burning it inland meant
exposing entire communities to poisoning fumes and to high risks of leaks and spills. Ocean dumping
was outlawed internationally in 1972.
    The world’s most industrialized countries rushed to find a suitable alternative for the disposal
of their hazardous waste. Ocean incineration, a process that consisted in the thermal destruction
of toxic liquid substances in specially designed ships outfitted with high-temperature combustion
chambers, seemed to be the time-honored panacea. It was deemed innocuous because of the buffering
capacity of the oceans; it promised to keep high industrial productivity and minimize externalities;
most importantly, it occurred largely outside of people’s eyes.15



11.   Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View From the Receiving End,” Paper presented at the Con-
      ference at the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., March 25-27, 1999 and Id., “Americanization and Anti-
      Americanism,” American Quarterly 2 (2006): 503-517. A recent historiographical attempt to consider US overseas bases
      as vectors of Americanization has been made, though passim, by Michael Heale, Sylvia Hilton, Halina Parafianowicz, Paul
      Schor, and Maurizio Vaudagna, “Watersheds in Time and Place: Writing American History in Europe,” in Historians Across
      Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age, ed. Nicholas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck and Cecile Vidal.
      Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

12. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, And Transformed American Culture Since World War II. New York:
    Cambridge University Press, 1997.

13. Saverio Giovacchini, “John Kitzmiller, Euro-American Difference, and the Cinema of the West,” Black Camera, 2 (2015):
    17-41. On the concept of Circum-Atlantic see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic
    World, 1500–1800, eds. David Armitage, Michael J. Braddick. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

14. Ocean incineration was first experimented in Germany, then in the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, in the Nordic countries
    and in the United States. The testing started in 1969. By 1990 all the major countries of the world abandoned the project.
    See Arnold W. Reitze, Andrew N. Davis, “Reconsidering Ocean Incineration as Part of a U.S. Hazardous Waste Management
    Program: Separating the Rhetoric from the Reality,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, 4 (1990): 687-798.

15. Remi Parmentier, “Greenpeace and the Dumping of Waste at Sea: A Case of Non-State Actors’ Intervention in International
    Affairs,” International Negotiation, 1 (1999): 435-55.



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     Throughout the 1970s, ad hoc national and international regulation tried with difficulty to bridle
ocean incineration. Soon a rift emerged between those countries, like the US, that wanted to make
ample use of the practice and those countries, like the Northern European ones, that saw at sea incin-
eration merely as an interim solution. In the US, military elites and private companies alike seized the
opportunity, the former to dismiss an outdated and quite embarrassing chemical arsenal, the latter to
make profits. Hence, in spite of poor monitoring, unreliable data, inadequate studies, scientific uncer-
tainties, and wrong assumptions, and thanks to US’s largely uncritical endorsement, at sea incineration
soared.
     In the early 1980s, however, people stepped in the breach and called the bluff. Strong local protests
at first coalesced in the coastal areas of those US states facing the Gulf of Mexico, where the main US
offshore incineration zone was located. Environmentalist groups helped these coastal communities
to organize, mobilize, get informed, and denounce ocean incineration’s flaws. Coalition building and
networking broadened the anti-ocean incineration front. In the US, opposition against this waste dis-
posal method cut across political lines: Congressmen and Congresswomen of different political colors,
city councils, state assemblies, and governors eventually endorsed the “Ban the Burn” campaign. In
Europe, a series of direct actions and nationally coordinated lobbying activities worked to discour-
age the governments from further pursuing offshore incineration. At the same time, people started
pushing for the adoption of waste reduction policies and for a ban on international waste trade.
     The activities of such NGOs as Greenpeace and the Oceanic Society proved to be crucial. First,
they contributed to enlightening the structural deficiencies and dangers of ocean incineration. Sec-
ondly, they kept citizens, governments and international organizations alike up to date, by commis-
sioning and distributing studies on the environmental and human impacts of that technology and by
countering the overtly positive depiction of it provided by the industry. Finally, they gathered the
consensus needed to isolate those supportive positions like the US’s one and shaped the agenda for
the final phase out of at sea incineration.
     By the end of 1988, as a result of a campaign that was both global and local, ocean incineration
was abandoned by the US and by almost any industrial power of the world. The offshore destruction
of dangerous chemical compounds was formally outlawed at the international level in 1997. In 2013,
the International Maritime Organization applied further restrictions to the kinds of waste that could
be incinerated at sea. The awareness of the people that mobilized against ocean incineration limited
the toxic legacy of that practice. The historical analysis of that awareness is the best guarantee for the
future of ours and ocean’s health.
     The book I am currently writing is meant to offer the very first comprehensive overview of ocean
incineration and complement — and contextualize — a hyper-specialized scientific literature. More
importantly, the book is supposed to uncover the varied social efforts that dissuaded governments
from pursuing such a highly toxic and polluting practice. While touching on such hotly themes of
current historiographic debate as the nature of 1970s normative environmentalism, the rise of global
interdependence, the affirmation of neoliberal policies, and the decline of US hegemony, my book’s
innovative character mostly lies in two claims.16 First, it establishes a close relationship between chem-
ical waste treatment and discourses on environmental injustice. Organochlorine and other toxic com-
pounds such as dioxin and PCBs, similarly to the much-studied residues of nuclear processes, endan-
gered communities whose socio-economic texture depended on a symbiotic relationship with their
natural environment.17 In this regard, when the ocean became the new wasteland — or, in imperial
terms, the new disposable frontier — coastal, low-income communities who relied on fishery and
seasonal tourism came to be the new sacrificial victims of industrial capitalism.



16. The 1970s have been defined as an “Environmental Decade” that, according to Walter Rosenbaum “created the legal, po-
    litical, and institutional foundations” of national and international environmental policies,” see Walter A. Rosenbaum, En-
    vironmental Politics and Policy. Washington DC, 1980, 11-12. See also John Barkdull, “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Ocean
    Environment: A Case of Executive Branch Dominance,” in The Environment, International Relations, and U.S. Foreign Pol-
    icy, ed. Paul Harris. Washington DC: SAGE, 2002, 135 and J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment. Albuquerque:
    University of New Mexico Press, 2012, 196-198.

17.   See, among the others, Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton:
      Princeton University Press, 2006.



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    Secondly, my book interweaves macro and micro, global and local levels of analyses. As a socio-
political battlefield, ocean incineration saw the juxtaposition of transnational protests and local de-
mands, global concerns and local responses. I have tackled this theme elsewhere, and “translocal”
forms of dissent that outgrew the spatial boundaries of their communities are attracting growing and
varied scholarly interest.18 In the case of the opposition against at sea incineration the quest for pre-
serving the local environment and socio-economic structure converged into an interest in wider en-
vironmental issues such as the protection of the marine ecosystem, the quality of ocean’s water, and
the preservation of the human food chain. The combination of localism and globalism was, I argue,
the distinctive cipher of these protests.



3 Conclusion
The Bologna school of political history has represented a crucial springboard for my academic career.
It has given me the operative knowledge on which I have grounded both my research and teaching. In
Bologna I learned to pay attention to state actors, electoral systems, and political machineries, some-
thing that has helped me to better identify and scrutinize historical agency. My supervisor has taught
me how to assess the performative role of public debate, political discourse, and culture; he has also
introduced me to the study of the Cold War and the US empire, and has helped me connecting my
research with the broader international historiography. Moving to the Netherlands has given me the
possibility to concentrate on transnational history and sharpen up a bottom-up approach to the study
of the US empire. Working at an international research institute and in close proximity to such impor-
tant archives as the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam has made my historian’s
life easier.
     Taken together, the two projects I am currently carrying out represent a personal attempt to reply
to some questions that have permeated my whole research so far. First, what has been the broader
environmental footprint of the American empire? Secondly, is it possible to assess it from the pe-
riphery or, better, from the viewpoints of the US imperial subjects? Thirdly, if we expand the notion
of environment so to include socio-economic structures, values, and norms, what is then the anthro-
pocenic legacy of the US imperial modes and practices? I am arguably still far from having provided
any definitive answer to these questions, but I hope that a focus on people’s everyday life and agency,
along with a combination of transnational and local approaches, may help to further problematize
and contextualize the role and the history of the US in the world.




18. Michael S. Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s. New York: Hill and
    Wang, 2013, and Dario Fazzi, “The Nuclear Freeze Generation.”



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