THE NECESSARY FASCIST INTERLUDE:

 Authoritarian Spain and Portugal under Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar, whom some political scientists consider fascists (and in any case they were right-wing dictators), were neutral in World War II, with the exception that Spain sent volunteers to Operation Barbarossa (the so-called Blue Division).

These two countries are a good introduction to the Cold War part of my thesis. Among the founders of NATO, supposedly the guardian of the free liberal world, was precisely Salazar's Portugal, despite the North Atlantic Treaty's statement that signatories "are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law."

Franco, on the other hand, especially during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, developed a strong relationship on an anti-communist basis with the U.S., but without joining NATO. Tom Gallagher, in his recently published biography of Salazar, writes:

Through the 1950s Spain also quickly emerged from the diplomatic isolation it had endured in the late 1940s. In 1949 Churchill had swum against the West European tide by stating in the House of Commons that excluding Spain from NATO left "a serious gap in the strategic arrangements for Western Europe." Unlike Salazar, Franco, having begun by sharing the same deeply sceptical views of the United States, decided to focus on building up strong bilateral ties with Washington. Senior American generals such as General Omar Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the view in 1948 that the Iberian peninsula could well be 'the last foothold in continental Europe' that might be held if the Soviet Union mounted an invasion. A geostrategic partnership gathered pace in the 1950s, leading to Franco ceding the Americans the right to establish three airbases and a submarine base on Spanish soil (a concession unacceptable to Salazar in terms of his own relations with the U.S.).

Are Spain and Portugal under Franco and Salazar part of the West, or do they become so only after the establishment of democracy in the 1970s? 

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