John Laughland (born 6 September 1963) is a British eurosceptic conservative journalist, academic and author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy.
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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 degree, the 'habilitation,' 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 is also 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.
Since 2008, he has been Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris. He is also a research member of the Centre for the History of Central Europe at the Sorbonne (Paris - IV).
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."[1]
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 (the Security Council acted ultra vires by creating it) and because he disagrees with its judicial procedures, e.g. 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 as strong a critic of the Kosovo War in 1999 as he has been of the Iraq War.
Laughland has taken a number of controversial positions, in criticising Western support for the Serbian opposition to Slobodan Milošević and his condemnation of the November 2003 revolution in Georgia as a "coup d'état".
Laughland has claimed that Ukraine's Presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko's coalition, were linked with "neo-Nazis" in an article for The Guardian in 2004,[2] that his ultimately successful attempts to seize power were backed on the streets by "druggy skinheads from Lvov" in The Spectator;[3] that reports of mass graves in Iraq were being exaggerated for political purposes;[4]and that concern for the massacres in the Sudan was driven by oil.[5] British journalist David Aaronovitch, in November 2004, condemned Laughland and others, asserting they were "apologists for the worst regimes and most appalling dictators on the planet."[6]