"This new era of liberal governance saw a fourth pillar of political authority join the old tripartite structure of democratic rule as the institutions of the market took their place alongside parliaments, the executive branch, and the judiciary. As the postwar institutions of democracy were challenged, new ones were found to replace them, and new—often more conservative—norms came to transform the way they actually worked. Actually existing democracy was overhauled; and long before the decade was out the reinvention of the West was underway. Critically, the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991 represented a denouement to this process, rather than the beginning it is usually taken for; the now liberated countries of the East being swept up into the ongoing history of liberal reinvention in the West. Fatefully, it also provided Western political liberalism within opportunity not only to overlook the difficulties already apparent in the liberal democratic consensus, but in many ways to intensify their effect."