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This chapter identifies and discusses two principle strategies employed by judges in national and international courts: disintegrationism and integrationism. Disintegrationism involves the division of one complex dispute into a multiplicity of mini-disputes arising under different specific legal regimes and the application of the distinct norms of one specific legal regime to one aspect of the dispute, excluding other relevant norms or circumstances; integrationism encourages judges to adopt a comprehensive approach towards different, yet closely related, disputes and to apply all relevant norms to all related circumstances. The chapter then draws an analogy between the debate over the fragmentation of international law into distinct self-contained regimes and the choice between disintegrationism and integrationism, and describes dualism (and to a lesser degree hierarchy) as a disintegrationist strategy.

This chapter examines the relationship between the WTO and public international law in the context of the fragmentation of international law. It points to two driving forces for the fragmentation of international law: the tendency of states to enter into international agreements with historical or geographic proximity; and diversification and specialization of international law. With the trend of ‘polycentric globalization’, functionally differentiated and specialized regimes tend to appear autonomous and isolate themselves from general public international law and thus view themselves as ‘self-contained’ regimes. However, the claim of self-containment depends largely on how one perceives international legal order: universalistic or particularistic. Universalistic general international lawyers pursue legal unity and try to avoid fragmentation of international law, while particularistic international lawyers tend to cherish their special realm. Relying on the presumption against conflicts and the principle of systemic integration, this chapter explores possible ways to defragmentize international law and pursue coherence.

Many efforts of international cooperation serve to organize global public goods, to set up regimes for global commons, and to promote fundamental values. Friedmann welcomed these developments as a law of cooperation, where states go beyond merely coordinating sovereign interests but indeed reach out for collective action. Friedmann’s diagnosis correctly described the essence of today’s international law and its developments. Diverse international regimes exist, particularly in areas such as human rights, environmental protection, and economic relations. However, public goods and fundamental values can hardly be achieved by those regimes in separation. A proper interaction across the various agreements and regimes is vital. States should join to achieve common ends. A ‘new’ law of cooperation is needed, aimed at promoting public goods and values across the diverse regimes and concerned about the integrity of the international legal order also addressing dimensions of efficiency and legitimacy.

The process of interpreting the treaties of international economic law is a key aspect of the analysis that is undertaken in this book. Of particular importance is the potential relevance of the international climate regime to interpreting international economic law—a regime recently rejuvenated by the Paris Agreement, and in fulfilment of whose aims emissions trading schemes are adopted and maintained. Chapter 2 therefore sets out the methodology of the book—namely, interpreting and applying international economic law to emissions trading schemes—and assesses whether and how the international climate regime might play a role in that process.

There is a dialectical relation between law and uncertainty, the forms of which vary from one legal field to another. This chapter identifies the three key questions which frame the examination of this dialectic in the following chapters in the book: how is the future imagined in a particular legal field; how are these imaginings translated into rights, duties and competences operating in the present; and how does the distribution of rights, duties and comeptencies affect the distribution of risks, costs and benefits?The chapter explores the involvement of international law in debates about future imaginings, the reconfiguration of risk and the impacts of those future imaginings, be they utopian or dystopian, on present and future subjects of international law.

The book concludes with the suggestion that Russia’s approach to the right of peoples to self-determination may be best understood not only in terms of Russian power politics disguised as legal rhetoric but can be seen as evidence of traits of a regional (re-)fragmentation of international law. Even basic agreement on what self-determination as a concept of international law means and what role related concepts such as territorial integrity, secession, referendum, or the prohibition of the use of force do or should play in that context seems almost unattainable, to the effect that international law as a single epistemological frame is arguably in a similar danger as during Soviet times. Today, apart from Lauri Mälksoo’s work and occasional contributions by a handful of other scholars in the West, analyses of Russia’s post-Soviet state practice and doctrine in the international legal discourse usually confine themselves to assess the legality of Russia’s actions in terms of positive international law. Such a limited approach fails to attempt to understand diverging views on international law, something which was perceived as self-evident during the Cold War period.