Post-WWI minority treaties legitimized the very statelessness they claimed to remedy.

Evidence

The point, of course, is that the European status quo could not be preserved and that it became clear only after the downfall of the last remnants of European autocracy that Europe had been ruled by a system which had never taken into account or responded to the needs of at least 25 per cent of her population. This evil, however, was not cured with the establishment of the succession states, because about 30 per cent of their roughly 100 million inhabitants were officially recognized as exceptions who had to be specially protected by minority treaties. This figure, moreover, by no means tells the whole story; it only indicates the difference between peoples with a government of their own and those who supposedly were too small and too scattered to reach full nationhood. The Minority Treaties covered only those nationalities of whom there were considerable numbers in at least two of the succession states, but omitted from consideration all the other nationalities without a government of their own, so that in some of the succession states the nationally frustrated peoples constituted 50 per cent of the total population. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 675

Categorization

• XREF: Direct foundation for later Islamophobia readings on the rights-of-man framework and who counts as entitled to protection — the Minority Treaties define the category of exception that stateless populations later inherit.