Southern Europe as a region sharing common features emerged as a concept in the thinking of American and British policymakers during the 1970s. The collapse of authoritarian regimes in Portugal and Greece and the end of the dictatorship in Spain, taking place almost simultaneously in the mid-1970s, were the political facts underlying this assumption. It was not however only a problem of transition from authoritarianism to democracy that shaped events. The rise of the Communist Party of Italy and the prospect of communist participation in a NATO member-state's parliamentary government posed questions of viability of democracy within the Cold War context. Seen from this angle the main southern European dilemma was the relation of authoritarianism and democracy with Cold War imperatives that shaped international relations from the immediate post-war era to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Till the 1970s these countries were treated ad hoc and separately by Western policymakers. Greece had entered the post-war period seen in its Near East and Balkan context. Portugal was perceived as an integral part of the Atlantic area, seen by naval powers as an important staging post to Europe while Spain, although isolated as a result of domestic political developments, belonged to the western European geographical and historical setup. Italy was perceived as belonging to a Mediterranean context, a crucial circle in the chain connecting the western and the eastern Mediterranean ends, and simultaneously to a western European one.