Minority status differed from statelessness because less fundamental rights were untouched

Evidence

The minorities were only half stateless; de jure they belonged to some political body even though they needed additional protection in the form of special treaties and guarantees; some secondary rights, such as speaking one’s own language and staying in one’s own cultural and social milieu, were in jeopardy and were halfheartedly protected by an outside body; but other more elementary rights, such as the right to residence and to work, were never touched. … The framers of the Minority Treaties did not foresee the possibility of wholesale population transfers or the problem of people who had become “undeportable” because there was no country on earth in which they enjoyed the right to residence. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 682

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt distinguishes ‘half stateless’ minorities (who still hold de jure membership and whose less elementary rights are untouched) from fully stateless people — an important gradation for the field’s vocabulary.
• XREF: connects to: Internal exile affects marginalized few, not majorities facing open oppression — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 156