The French Revolution fused human rights with national sovereignty, making statelessness mean rightlessness.

Evidence

The worst factor in this situation was not even that it became a matter of course for the nationalities to be disloyal to their imposed government and for the governments to oppress their nationalities as efficiently as possible, but that the nationally frustrated population was firmly convinced—as was everybody else—that true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights. In this conviction, which could base itself on the fact that the French Revolution had combined the declaration of the Rights of Man with national sovereignty, they were supported by the Minority Treaties themselves, which did not entrust the governments with the protection of different nationalities but charged the League of Nations with the safeguarding of the rights of those who, for reasons of territorial settlement, had been left without national states of their own. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 675

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core mechanic in the toolkit: human rights attach to membership in a nation-state; without the state, rights collapse. This is the mechanism the Islamophobia readings will build on for populations cast as outside the nation.