  The commonly accepted belief that non-Abelian and Abelian models are
different because of the presence/absence of instantons and/or perturbative
asymptotic freedom is analyzed from a historical perspective. The presentation
covers the major developments which brought about this dogma, as well as all
the supportive evidence produced since. For a model possessing both asymptotic
freedom and instantons it is shown rigorously that a disorder variable varies
nonanalytically with the temperature.
