John Laughland (born 6 September 1963) is a British eurosceptic conservative author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy. He is a university lecturer in France and the director of Forum for Democracy International. [1]
John Laughland (born 6 September 1963) is a British eurosceptic conservative author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy. He is a university lecturer in France and the director of Forum for Democracy International. [1]
Laughland has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford, studied at Munich University, and has been a lecturer at the University of Paris 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. [2] He then worked for Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a Rassemblement National MEP in the European Parliament until 2019, and thereafter for Derk Jan Eppink, Rob Roos and Rob Rooken, MEPs who were then members of Forum for Democracy. [3]
Since 2021 John Laughland has been on the teaching staff of ICES, the Catholic Institute of the Vendée in La Roche-sur-Yon in Western France, as a lecturer in political science, political philosophy and history. Laughland also works as the director of the international department of Dutch political party Forum voor Democratie under Thierry Baudet. From September 2022 to February 2023 he was Visiting Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.
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." [4]
The former UK Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane, has described Laughland as "one of the intellectual architects of Brexit". [5]
Laughland 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, 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 opposition to Slobodan Milošević. [6] [7]
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, [8] that his ultimately successful attempts to seize power were backed on the streets by "druggy skinheads from Lvov" in The Spectator ; [9] that reports of mass graves in Iraq were being exaggerated for political purposes; [10] and that concern for the massacres in the Sudanese Civil War was driven by oil. [11]
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The political groups of the European Parliament are the officially recognised political groups consisting of legislators of aligned ideologies in the European Parliament.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Dutch journalist, politician in the Netherlands, and former cabinet secretary for European Commissioners Bolkestein (1999–2004) and Kallas (2004–2007). In 2009, he was elected to the European Parliament for List Dedecker, and in 2019 for Forum for Democracy. In 2021, he became an MP in the Dutch House of Representatives for the JA21 party, but in 2023 he switched to the Farmer-Citizen Movement.
John F. Clark is a professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University, Miami and former Fulbright scholar. He specializes in state-society relations of African polities and the international relations of sub-Saharan Africa.
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The Institute of Democracy and Cooperation is a think tank in Paris. It is a separate organisation from the similarly named think-tank in New York. Both were founded in 2008 by a Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena and a group of Russian NGOs, but they were operationally and structurally independent of one another. The main purpose of the organisations was to provide a symmetrical response to the allegations of Freedom House about the human rights violations in Russia. The New York IDC gets defunct in 2015. The Paris site is headed by historian and former Russian State Duma deputy Natalia Narochnitskaya. The British philosopher and historian John Laughland is Director of Studies.
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Forum for Democracy is a far-right political party in the Netherlands, founded as a think tank by Thierry Baudet and Henk Otten in 2016. The party first participated in elections in the 2017 general election, winning two seats in the House of Representatives.
An election of the Members of the European Parliament from the Netherlands was held on 23 May 2019. It is the ninth time the elections have been held for the European elections in the Netherlands. The number of Dutch seats was to increase from 26 to 29 following Brexit, but due to the extension of the Article 50 process in the United Kingdom, the number of seats to be elected will remain at 26.
Identity and Democracy is a right-wing to far-right political group of the European Parliament, launched on 13 June 2019 for the Ninth European Parliament term. It is composed of nationalist, right-wing populist and eurosceptic national parties from ten European nations. It is the successor to the Europe of Nations and Freedom group formed during the eighth term.
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Rob Jan Rooken is a Dutch politician who has served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2 July 2019.
JA21 is a political party in the Netherlands, active in the House of Representatives and Senate. It was founded on 18 December 2020 by Joost Eerdmans and Annabel Nanninga after they left the Forum for Democracy (FVD) on 26 November 2020. The party, affiliated with conservative liberalism, first participated in elections in the 15–17 March 2021 general election.
Olaf René Ephraim is a Dutch investment banker and politician. He worked for the banks MeesPierson and Fortis before joining the conservative and right-wing populist party Forum for Democracy (FvD). Ephraim served as the party's treasurer and was elected to the House of Representatives in the 2021 general election. He left Forum for Democracy in May 2021 and joined Wybren van Haga's new political party Belang van Nederland (BVNL).
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Henk Otten is a Dutch politician and economist. He has been a member of the Senate since June 2019. He was the co-founder of the party Forum for Democracy (FvD) along with Thierry Baudet. He served as FvD treasurer from 2016 to 2019.
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