The minority treaties arbitrarily stratified peoples into rulers and the ruled

Evidence

The Treaties lumped together many peoples in single states, called some of them “state people” and entrusted them with the government, silently assumed that others (such as the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, or the Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia) were equal partners in the government, which of course they were not, and with equal arbitrariness created out of the remnant a third group of nationalities called “minorities,” thereby adding to the many burdens of the new states the trouble of observing special regulations for part of the population. The result was that those peoples to whom states were not conceded, no matter whether they were official minorities or only nationalities, considered the Treaties an arbitrary game which handed out rule to some and servitude to others. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 673

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘state people’ versus ‘minorities’ stratification prefigures the arbitrary legal categories that later produce statelessness.
• CANDY: The arbitrariness of the treaties’ tripartite division (state people, assumed partners, minorities) is a vivid, easily-retold snapshot.