Minority treaties could single out groups for expulsion rather than protect them
Evidence
It was obvious, and even the Evian Conference recognized it in 1938, that all German and Austrian Jews were potentially stateless; and it was only natural that the minority countries should be encouraged by Germany’s example to try to use the same methods for getting rid of some of their minority populations. Among the minorities the Jews and the Armenians ran the greatest risks and soon showed the highest proportion of statelessness; but they proved also that minority treaties did not necessarily offer protection but could also serve as an instrument to single out certain groups for eventual expulsion. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 689
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Inverts the assumed protective function of minority treaties — a mechanism relevant to how legal protections can be repurposed for exclusion in the Islamophobia field.
Related
- Post-WWI minority treaties legitimized the very statelessness they claimed to remedy. (similarity 0.84)
- Minority Treaties functioned as disguised assimilation tools favoring dominant nation-states (similarity 0.81)
- Minority treaties alienated both minorities and the new states meant to protect them (similarity 0.80)
- The minority treaties arbitrarily stratified peoples into rulers and the ruled (similarity 0.80)
- Minority-treaty designers never intended protected groups to remain permanently separate (similarity 0.79)
- The Minority Treaties institutionalized the principle that only same-origin nationals deserve full legal protection. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group
#complicates(0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 294