Two major kinds of political issues marked the process which produced the UNHCR from the debates of ECOSOC and the GA during 1949 and 1950. The first was a product of the growing tensions between the West and the East and was linked with the second, the very basic issue of what the international community should do with refugees. This discontent had been a major factor in the debates that had created the IRO and had also been a factor of great importance in shaping the way in which the IRO had operated, and in determining its successes and failures. These tensions had reached much more serious proportions by early 1948 with the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade and airlift. It reached its height in 1949–50 with the dispute between the USSR and Yugoslavia, the appearance of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of the Korean conflict in 1950. In Europe, growing East–West tensions had brought about the declaration of the Truman Doctrine (12 March 1947), the initiation of the Marshall Plan economic aid program (June 1947), and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the Western military shield against the threat of Soviet attack (April 1949). There was also the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany out of Western-occupied Germany, and the setting up of the German Democratic Republic out of what had been Soviet-occupied Germany (May and October 1949). Moreover, the East in October 1947 had created the Cominform as the central organization for international communism. Thus Europe had become politically, economically and socially divided, and the opposition of each side to the other had gravely hardened.