John Laughland


John Laughland is a British eurosceptic conservative academic and author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy.

Career

Laughland has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford, studied at Munich University, and has been a lecturer at the Sorbonne and at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. He also holds the French post-doctoral habilitation degree for his work on sovereignty in international relations.
Laughland has contributed articles to The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, Brussels Journal, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The American Conservative and Antiwar.com.
He was until 2008 the European director of the European Foundation, a eurosceptic think-tank chaired by Bill Cash MP. Laughland was guest editor of The Monist in January 2007.
From 2008 to 2018, he was Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, which is headed by Natalia Narochnitskaya, a Russian historian and former State Duma deputy.
He then worked for Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a Rassemblement National MEP in the European Parliament until 2019, and for Derk Jan Eppink, a Forum for Democracy MEP since.

Publications and positions

In 1997, he published The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, a critique in which he contends that the European Union shares some ideological affinity with Fascism, Nazism and communism, notably its rejection of the nation-state. Sir Edward Heath, the former Prime Minister who signed the UK's Treaty of Accession to the Treaty of Rome in 1972, dismissed the book as "Preposterous...a hideous distortion of both past and present."
He has written extensively on international criminal justice, condemning the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on the grounds that the UN Security Council resolution that created it was illegitimate and because he disagrees with its judicial procedures, for example admissibility of hearsay evidence. He criticises it as a political tribunal and claimed double standards for refusing to open an investigation into whether NATO committed war crimes in Yugoslavia in 1999. Laughland was a strong critic of NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War in 1999, and also opposed the Iraq War.
Laughland has taken a number of controversial positions like criticizing Western support for the anti-Serbian opposition to Slobodan Milošević.
Laughland has claimed that Ukraine's Presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko's coalition was linked with "neo-Nazis" in an article for The Guardian in 2004, that his ultimately successful attempts to seize power were backed on the streets by "druggy skinheads from Lvov" in The Spectator; that reports of mass graves in Iraq were being exaggerated for political purposes; and that concern for the massacres in the Sudanese Civil War was driven by oil.