Statelessness means falling outside the international legal web that protects citizens

Evidence

The second loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of government protection, and this did not imply just the loss of legal status in their own, but in all countries. Treaties of reciprocity and international agreements have woven a web around the earth that makes it possible for the citizen of every country to take his legal status with him no matter where he goes (so that, for instance, a German citizen under the Nazi regime might not be able to enter a mixed marriage abroad because of the Nuremberg laws). Yet, whoever is no longer caught in it finds himself out of legality altogether (thus during the last war stateless people were invariably in a worse position than enemy aliens who were still indirectly protected by their governments through international agreements). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 716

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key mechanism: international reciprocity treaties create a legal web, and exclusion from it constitutes loss of all legality.
• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how legal categorization itself produces exclusion, and Arendt’s broader argument in this chapter about ‘the end of the rights of man’.