Minority Treaties functioned as disguised assimilation tools favoring dominant nation-states

Evidence

Not that the minorities would trust the League of Nations any more than they had trusted the state peoples. The League, after all, was composed of national statesmen whose sympathies could not but be with the unhappy new governments which were hampered and opposed on principle by between 25 and 50 per cent of their inhabitants. Therefore the creators of the Minority Treaties were soon forced to interpret their real intentions more strictly and to point out the “duties” the minorities owed to the new states; it now developed that the Treaties had been conceived merely as a painless and humane method of assimilation, an interpretation which naturally enraged the minorities. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 676

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how ostensibly protective international instruments can encode majority-nationalist assumptions. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• DEFINE: Clarifies the operative meaning of the Minority Treaties within the nation-state system.