And Czechoslovakia was a member of the Warsaw Pact when the Prague Spring was crushed. Simply being an official member of an alliance doesn't mean you have a lot to do with that alliance's actions. Though I freely admit that I was thinking far more of Sweden in that post than any of the other Scandinavian states.
I'm well-aware of the concept of Finlandisation. For a while there it looked like Austria might go the same way.
Hence my description of them as "slowly integrating themselves into the EU." Several Scandinavian states are members, but there's more to being part of the EU than simply being a member-state. Look at the UK.
And that portrayal is quite incorrect. The only places that were really "heavily-armed" during the Cold War were the USSR and the US, along with a few fringe states like Israel, the Koreas and Iran, all of which had obvious reasons for involving themselves in an arms race that were only peripherally related to the primary conflict between the superpowers. Many states, such as India, were almost forced into picking sides during the Cold War despite their attempts to remain neutral, whereas there were other states, notably Egypt, which used the whole thing simply as an excuse to play both sides off against each other. Albania and Yugoslavia were Communist states that had as little to do with the USSR as possible, for example, while Japan had a very sizable Communist party that had absolutely nothing to do with either Moscow or Beijing. The Cold War was very, very complex.
And Stalin's army couldn't impose communism on either states, so I fail to see your point. It's also an incorrect statement by Stalin, since most states are quite happy to let their allies and clients keep their internal policies. How many non-communist states did Moscow and Beijing ally themselves with, and how many dictatorships did the US prop up? If Stalin said that - and I've never seen the quote before - he was pretty far off-base, if not outright lying for his audience.
