John Laughland

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John Laughland is a British eurosceptic conservative journalist, academic and author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy. He has taken a number of controversial positions, such as when he criticised Western support for the Serbian opposition to Slobodan Milošević, and when he condemned the November 2003 revolution in Georgia as a "coup d'état".

Laughland has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford, has studied at Munich University, and has been a lecturer at the Sorbonne and at the Institute d'Études Politiques de Paris. He also holds the French post-doctoral degree, the 'habilitation,' for his work on sovereignty in international relations.

In 1997, he published the book The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, a savage critique in which he contends that the European Union is ideologically rooted in fascism, Nazism and communism. Sir Edward Heath, the europhile former Prime Minister who signed the Treaty of Rome in 1973, dismissed the book as "Preposterous...a hideous distortion of both past and present." [1]

Initially a supporter of Western intervention in the Balkans, he has since condemned 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. He criticises it as a political tribunal and draws attention to its 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 claimed that Ukraine's Presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko's coalition, to whom significant elements of Ukraine's Jewish community have given support [2], were linked with "neo-Nazis", (in The Guardian [3]) that his ultimately successful attempts to seize power were backed on the streets by "druggy skinheads from Lvov" (The Spectator); that reports of mass graves in Iraq were being exaggerated for political purposes; and that concern for the massacres in the Sudan was driven by a lust for oil.

Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, and has contributed articles to The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, 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. He writes a fortnightly column for www.sandersresearch.com. Laughland was guest editor of The Monist in January 2007.

[edit] Bibliography

The Death of Politics: France Under Mitterrand (Michael Joseph, London, 1994)
The Tainted Source, the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea (Little Brown, London 1997; later translated into French, Spanish, Czech and Polish)
Le tribunal pénal international: Gardien du nouvel ordre mondial (François-Xavier de Guibert, Paris, 2003)
Israel on Israel co-edited with Michel Korinman (Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2006)
Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (Pluto Press, London, 2007)
A History of Political Trials (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2007)
Schelling versus Hegel: from German idealism to Christian metaphysics (Ashgate, 2007)