Things were bad during World War II, really bad. Nazi’s were spreading fascism, the Soviet’s were spreading communism, and Japan was spreading imperialism. They had significant leverage, too, what with killing and forcing people’s hand and all. In 1940 the world was down to just a dozen or so democracies. The list of fourteen countries left to democracy was as follows: Great Britain, United States of America, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. It’s a pretty dismal amount of countries.
The majority of the countries were Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, too. Here in the U.S. we like to shove democracy on everyone. True to form, we helped win World War II and started pushing them to have a democracy. Today, there are still a lot of dictatorships, but democratic nations aren’t so few and far between. We still push for everyone to be a democracy, though.