ABSTRACT
According to Ernest Gellner, Liberalization applies just as much to Eastern as to Southern Europe, and calls for analyses which cannot at present be found in the literature of political science. In Eastern Europe, there are no clear grounds for assuming that liberalization has become the order of the day. An examination of Eastern Europe is now in order, to confirm or invalidate the Ernest Gellner thesis. In fact, none of the three regimes of Greece, Spain or Portugal deserved the adjective ideocratic. The dialogue between the two former labor camp occupants, Solzhenitsyn and Panin, illustrates Ernest Gellner's Revolution/Liberalization antithesis. One could thus paraphrase Karl Marx, in a way, and write that a specter is haunting Europe today: it is the specter of freedom. But one must add that there is another specter, which haunts Europe still, and that is communism—better known, today, as the Red Army.
