Exclusionary Regimes, Financial Corporations, and Human Rights Activism in the UK, 1973–92

This paper examines the two British civic campaigns, Chile Solidarity Campaign and End Loans to Southern Africa, to investigate the role of financial sanctions on authoritarian regimes to suggest the limits of human rights movements in the late twentieth century. While they not only publicised the financial ties between authoritarian regimes and British banks but also garnered popular support, the campaigns had relatively little success owing to the rise of the liberal creed from the mid-1970s. First, the growth of commercial Euroloans, free from national regulations, was detrimental to putting political pressure on financial corporations; in the Euro-capital market, there was no institutional channel to convey the call for human rights. Second, the shift from a Labour government to a Conservative rendered it impossible to introduce governmental measures. Instead of the political pressure, the creditworthiness of the authoritarian regimes assessed by international banks leveraged the financial future of Chile and South Africa. (151 words).