An American in Austria sees hope in the election returns

It is a commonplace that sometimes you need to leave your country in order to find it. This Election Day found me in Graz, Austria, where I am attending the Elevate Festival, an annual four-day gathering that brings together cutting-edge indie music with a forum on political culture. This year’s theme was the commons.

At 4 o’clock in the morning, I found myself awake, watching President-Elect Barack Obama’s stirring speech in Chicago’s Grant Park. I was watching on CNN International, but two Austrian channels were also covering the event live, no small indication of the intense interest with which people around the world are watching Obama’s improbable political journey. People here are mesmerized by Obama’s quintessentially American story: the son of a Kenyan man and a Kansas woman who by dint of hard work, resourcefulness and self-reliance, catapults himself into the White House. Could there be a more persuasive telling of the American Dream?

But Obama’s significance goes far beyond himself. His rise is about us. It radiates to all corners of the world. At small victories parties in London Shanghai, Nairobi and dozens of other cities, Obama’s victory has given people permission to hope and dream in ways that have been impossible over the past eight years. At the conference today I spent several hours with Silke Helfrich, a German who for years ran the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Mexico City and who hosted a landmark conference on the commons in that city two years ago. As we walked back to the hotel after a lunch of spirited conversation, Silke put it plainly: the commons is not primarily about property rights or resources, even though those things obviously matter. The commons is primarily about constructing community. That is ultimately the most important tool for protecting our shared values and our collective assets. Even where law plays a key role, community is what enables us to reclaim the commons.

Will we be able to reconstruct community during the Obama years? This is the real challenge. Law alone will not save us. We must rediscover our common fate as a people and build new sets of working relationships – relationships that serve to protect the commons in fact. There will be no other way to find our way out the global financial mess, global warming and countless social problems. From this perspective, the Obama campaign must be seen as a warmup to a series of much bigger tests. Celebrate the achievement of this election, certainly. But make no mistake: the next four years will ask even more from us.

David Bollier is an editor of OnTheCommons.org and author of the The Viral Spiral: How Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, due soon from The New Press.