‘1989’ saw the adoption of liberal democracy in a series of negotiated, peaceful roundtable settlements that would provide a model for other regional political transitions in the following years. Yet few in Eastern Europe had been committed to such values in the previous decades. Oppositions were often committed to socioeconomic rights, whilst some reformers sought pluralism within the system. Authoritarian modernizations also remained attractive. And the use of force for regime survival remained an option until the end. Here we trace both the local and the international contexts in which reform Communists and oppositionists eventually came to embrace liberal democracy, reject the violence that was used to suppress reform in China, and embrace negotiation. In so doing, other movements addressing the crises of the 1970s and 1980s – those advocating social rights, collectivist-egalitarian values, populism, or direct or socialist democracy – were sidelined. Thus, for some 1989 represented the disciplining power of a newly emerging transitional elite allied to a global ‘democracy industry’. From the mid-1990s, the political right instrumentalised such interpretations to attack the post-1989 liberal order.