Minority protections historically covered religious but never political rights

Evidence

16 The first minorities arose when the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience accomplished the suppression of the principle cuius regio eius religio. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 had already taken steps to secure certain rights to the Polish populations in Russia, Prussia, and Austria, rights that certainly were not merely “religious”; it is, however, characteristic that all later treaties—the protocol guaranteeing the independence of Greece in 1830, the one guaranteeing the independence of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1856, and the Congress of Berlin in 1878 concerned with Rumania—speak of “religious,” and not “national” minorities, which were granted “civil” but not “political” rights. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2501

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia-field genealogy of how ‘minority’ as a category was constructed and what rights were withheld — the civil-but-not-political distinction prefigures later analysis of how exclusions are framed. — connects to: Constitutional revenue-sharing promises for minorities were never honored — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 298
• DEFINE: Pinpoints the historical origin of the minority concept in the shift from cuius regio eius religio to Protestant freedom of conscience.