Anglo-Iberian Relations 1939-1947: Britain, Spain, and the Survival of the Salazar Dictatorship

This thesis studies the trilateral relationship between the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal during the Second World War. It shows that, faced with enormous difficulties in keeping Spain from belligerency, Britain turned to Portugal to keep Franco from giving in to his Axis temptation. Drawing together British, Portuguese, and Spanish sources, this thesis shows that Portugal played no meaningful role in keeping Spain out of the War. Nevertheless, the idea of Portugal’s role in the War created a certain vision of Salazar’s Portugal in the minds of British policymakers as an allied neutral. This vision and idea of Portuguese allyship, promulgated by both leading Portuguese and British politicians and diplomats, created genuine and long-lasting developments in Anglo-Portuguese relations which long outlasted the live question of Spanish belligerency.

This vision created the circumstances in which the neutral Estado Novo – and its considerable global Empire – came to be seen as an ally in a war in which it had not participated. On the latter count, this thesis demonstrates the considerable interrelations between the European and global spheres, showing how the slow progress of the Portuguese Empire from neglected relic to centrepiece of Anglo- Portuguese relations was intimately related to the question of Spanish neutrality. In turn, it demonstrates how the legacy of this relationship – however imagined or poorly-understood – provided the basis for the Estado Novo to overcome domestic, international, and imperial uncertainties after the Second World War but before the Cold War. This thesis argues that these trilateral relations, never hitherto studied in the round, allowed Salazar’s Estado Novo’s a unique form of survival as an ally in the nascent Western order.