António Muñoz Sánchez is assistant researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. He obtained his doctorate in History from the European University Institute in Florence in 2010 with a PhD on the German social democracy's support for Spanish socialism during Francoism and the democratic transition. His current research fields are: 1. Political relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Portugal/Spain, 1960-1980. 2. Relations between Spain and Portugal during the parallel processes of negotiating access to the EEC, 1977-1985. 3. Spanish forced labourers in Europe during the Second World War, 1939-1945. The first project is based on the hypothesis that the German strategy towards the Iberian dictatorships was based on the same principle that inspired Willy Brandt's "ostpolitik": the conviction that closer ties between the West and Portugal/Spain were positive because they encouraged the liberalisation of the regimes. Bonn's pragmatic attitude towards Salazar/Caetano and Franco was never made explicit in order to avoid criticism from public opinion. The research aims to explain this "südpolitik" by presenting it as another facet of the European détente policy promoted by the German Social Democrats at the time. However, the evolution of Iberian politics exceeded the predictions of a slow transition process. In fact, the Carnation Revolution even put the European status quo at risk, forcing West Germany to devise a new strategy aimed at "stabilising" Portugal and avoiding political chaos in Spain after Franco's death. A key factor in this "emergency solution" for the Iberian Peninsula was the strengthening of non-communist parties. In this analysis of West Germany's influence on Iberian democratisation processes, the research focuses on support for Mário Soares' Socialist Party and Felipe González's Partido Socialista Obrero Español. The second project arises from the realisation that while joining the EEC brought Portugal and Spain to the end of a multi-century relationship of low intensity, this change did not occur during the process that led the two countries to join the Community simultaneously. On the contrary, the long road towards Europe was made with little coordination between Lisbon and Madrid, which also undertook no effort to anticipate, on a bilateral level, the European horizon to which they aspired, which involved closer economic, social and political ties in a spirit of fraternity. Portugal considered Spain to be a serious obstacle to its rapid accession to the Community and, moreover, a huge danger to its economy, once the borders between the two states disappeared. These considerations led successive Lisbon governments to try to completely separate the Portuguese negotiations from those of the neighbouring country, to aim for early entry and to defend with extraordinary zeal what they considered to be the right thing to do to protect the Portuguese economy from the supposed threats of the imminent Iberian market. The third project focuses on a new topic in historiography: the Spanish forced labourers of the Third Reich. To date, there has been no study of the tens of thousands of exiles from the Spanish Civil War who were subjected to forced labour in France by the Germans during the Second World War. The research focuses on reconstructing the living and working conditions of these "Rotspanier" during the war and the long and successful legal process they went through during the 1960s to be recognised by the Federal Republic of Germany as victims of Nazism.