Cold War bipolarity temporarily suppressed preexisting civilizational dynamics

Evidence

In the early years of the Cold War, the Canadian statesman Lester Pearson presciently pointed to the resurgence and vitality of non-Western societies. “It would be absurd,” he warned, “to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms.” Pointing out that international relations “for several centuries” had been the relations among the states of Europe, he argued that “the most far-reaching problems arise no longer between nations within a single civilization but between civilizations themselves.” The prolonged bipolarity of the Cold War delayed the developments which Pearson saw coming. The end of the Cold War released the cultural and civilizational forces which he identified in the 1950s, and a wide range of scholars and observers have recognized and highlighted the new role of these factors in global politics. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 102

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does Pearson’s 1950s warning actually trace to earlier interwar predictions of civilizational clash — and how much independent weight does post hoc ‘prescience’ really carry?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 102
• XREF: connects to: Cold War threat produced unprecedented internal cohesion in capitalist societies — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 160; Post-Cold War conventional wisdom held history had ended in Western victory — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 156