Noun meaning "government by hippopotami"

After all the fuss I made, now I find myself in a situation where I can't seem to avoid putting a German quote in my text. Alois Hahn writes "Fremdheit ist keine Eigenschaft, auch kein objektives Verhältnis zweier Personen oder Gruppen, sondern die Definition einer Beziehung."

The problem is, this sentence is dependent on a contrast between the words Verhältnis and Beziehung, both of which mean "relationship." The first refers to an objective, measurable relationship (like a ratio) and the second to a human relationship. Since there's no English word pair I can think of that expresses that contrast, a loose translation is the only way to go, and since a loose translation will lose so much of the original meaning, I think I have to leave the German in my text and provide the translation as a footnote.

The sentence, by the way, is my favorite from Hahn's text and expresses exactly what is so fascinating to me about the phenomenon of Otherness: "Otherness is neither a trait nor the result of an objective comparison between two persons or groups, but rather the definition of a relationship."

There are so many things in the human world that seem perfectly natural to us, but that, looked at objectively, are simply imaginary constructs that exist only to the extent that we perceive them. The state, the nation, money, marriage, property, privacy. Those are all nothing more than the definition of a relationship, and none of them has any objective reality, but most of our lives are defined by those very things.