Article Whose Public, Whose Order? Imperium, Region, and Normative Friction Christopher J. Borgent I. INTRODUCTION: AFTER THE END OF HISTORY .............................................................................332 II. THE NEW HAVEN SCHOOL AND DIVERSE PUBLIC ORDERS ..........................................................333 III. M ULTIPOLARITY AND M ULTINORMATIVITY .................................................................................335 A. The World and the Region in Defining Public Order..................................................... 335 B. The Role of Law in Defining a Public Order.................................................................. 337 C. Four Conceptions of Public Order................................................................................. 338 1. The U.N .!W TO System ........................................................................................339 2. The United States Imperium................................................................................ 340 3. The E U Regional O rder...................................................................................... 343 4. The Russian Regional O rder............................................................................... 344 D . C onclusions .....................................................................................................................34 7 IV. SYSTEMIC BORDERLANDS AND NORMATIVE FRICTION ................................................................347 A. Normative Colonization and Systemic Borderlands....................................................... 347 B . Defining Norm ative Friction........................................................................................... 349 V. SILK ROADS, GREAT GAMES, AND NORMATIVE FRICTION IN EURASIA .......................................349 A. The Borderlands of Eurasia:Normative FrictionAlong the Silk Road.......................... 350 1. The East European States ...................................................................................350 a. The G eopoliticalRegion .........................................................................350 b. The Normative Conflict: Europeanists, Atlanticists, Revanchists ..........350 2. The Black Sea/Caspian Region ...........................................................................352 a. The G eopoliticalRegion .........................................................................352 b. The Normative Conflict: Finding the Borders of Europe....................... 353 B. Overlapping Institutions, Interests, Ethnicities, and Conflicts .......................................355 VI. THE ROMANCE OF BLOOD AND SOIL: THE TURN FROM THE GLOBAL TO THE LOCAL ..................356 A. Public Order Diversity After the Cold War ....................................................................356 B. Reconsidering the New Haven School ............................................................................359 1. Am erica's Place in the World .............................................................................359 2. The Nature of Public Orders............................................................................... 360 3. The Nature of Conflict ........................................................................................360 4. The Nature of Cooperation................................................................................. 361 V II. A FTERW O RD ................................................................................................................................362 t Associate Professor, St. John's University School of Law. This Article benefited from the comments of John Barrett, Leonard Baynes, Lori Outzs Borgen, Paul Kirgis, Anita Krishnakumar, Peggy McGuinness, Mark Movsesian, Michael Perino, Michael Simons, Susan Stabile, Brian, Tamanaha, Nelson Tebbe, and Tim Zick. I am especially grateful for the comments of discussants from The Yale Journal of International Law Fifth Annual Young Scholars Conference (Mar. 10, 2007): Michael Reisman, Sarah Cleveland, Siegfried Wiessner, and Andrew Willard. I am also grateful to the editors and staff of The Yale Journal of International Law, and especially Chris Mandernach, Talia Inlender, Dan Noble, and editors-in-chief Stephen Ruckman and Lauren Baer for their suggestions and fine editorial work. This Article also benefited from the research assistance of Ana Castro, Samantha Chung, John Curley, and Evelyn Gong. Any mistakes are solely my own. THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 32: 331 I. INTRODUCTION: AFTER THE END OF HISTORY Theories of international law and politics are a product of their times. They focus on the issues of the day (or of the immediate past) and their assumptions are often the assumptions of the society in which they were born. Perhaps that it is why so many international relations scholars were surprised by the end of the Cold War: Their theories were so informed by bipolarity that they were unable to see the actual changes that would transform the state system. As international relations scholars are re-assessing their theories in a post-Cold War world, lawyers may do the same concerning international legal jurisprudence. Throughout the Cold War, the New Haven School of policy- oriented jurisprudence attempted to describe how law was actually used in the policymaking process and to suggest how it should be used towards the goals of securing human dignity and the spread of free societies.' But with the titanic struggle between competing world orders being replaced by parochial fights and feuds, whither the New Haven School? What insights does it have for today's world? Does the New Haven School's theory need to catch up to the practice of international law? This Article considers the strengths and weaknesses of the New Haven School in light of the competition among multiple conceptions of "world public order" that exist today. As a test case, I will look at the competition on the "grand chessboard" of Eurasia. At one time called the "world island" by geo-strategists, Eurasia today is home to seventy-five percent of the world's population, sixty percent of the global GNP, and contains about seventy-five percent of known energy sources. 2 It is also a geographic space where multiple conceptions of public order, including those of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and Islamic fundamentalists, overlap, interact, and at times compete. This is especially so in the unstable arc of states bordering Russia: from Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine in the West; down to the Caucasian countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the Russian southwest; and ultimately the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan to the Russian south. In Part II, I will introduce the idea of "diverse systems of public order" described in policy-oriented jurisprudence. I will also situate the New Haven School as part of the liberal modernist tradition that attempts to find universal I. See Myres S. McDougal & Harold D. Lasswell, The Identification and Appraisal of Diverse Systems of Public Order, 53 AM. J. INT'L L. 1 (1959) [hereinafter McDougal & Lasswell, Diverse Systems]; for other examples of key texts of policy-oriented jurisprudence, see also HAROLD D. LASSWELL & MYRES S. McDOUGAL, JURISPRUDENCE FOR A FREE SOCIETY: STUDIES IN LAW, SCIENCE AND POLICY (1992); Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell & Lung-chu Chen, Human Rights and World Public Order: A Frameworkfor Policy-OrientedInquiry, 63 AM. J. INT'L L. 237 (1969); Harold D. Lasswell, Yale Law School Professor, Universality in Perspective, Address Before the American Society of International Law (Apr. 30, 1959), in 53 AM. SoC'Y INT'L L. PROC. 1 (1959) [hereinafter Lasswell, Universality]; Myres S. McDougal, President of the American Society of International Law, Perspectives for an International Law of Human Dignity, Address Before the American Society of International Law (Apr. 30, 1959), in 53 AM. SOC'Y INT'L L. PROC. 107, 107 (1959) [hereinafter McDougal, Perspectives]. 2. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, THE GRAND CHESSBOARD: AMERICAN PRIMACY AND ITS GEOSTRATEGIC IMPERATIVES 31 (1997). The term "world island" was most notably used by British geographer Harold Mackinder. Id. at 38. See also JOHN AGNEW, GEOPOLITICS: RE-VISIONING WORLD POLITICS 28-29 (2d ed. 2003) (discussing Mackinder's world view). 2007] Whose Public, Whose Order? norms and/or techniques to address questions of political or normative conflict. Part III will examine the different public orders in today's multipolar, multinormative world. In Part IV, I will propose the concepts of systemic borderlands-statesthat are the geopolitical crossroads between two or more normative realms-and of normativefriction, the process in which competing conceptions of public order interact in these borderland states, as a means of describing the normative interactions in a multipolar world. Part V will consider examples of systemic borderlands and normative friction in Eurasia. In Part VI, I will propose ways in which the New Haven School can build on some of its own original insights on the existence of diverse systems of public order in light of changes in international politics. As this short Article can only scratch the surface3 of so many issues, I will also set out questions for further investigation. II. THE NEW HAVEN SCHOOL AND DIVERSE PUBLIC ORDERS The strengths and weaknesses of the New Haven School derive in part from its placement