A collective sigh of relief could be heard from Europe last week after Barack Obama emerged victorious; there is no doubting the fervent European desire to relegate the Bush doctrine to history and to return to a more collegial relationship with the White House. Yet Mr Obama’s welcome has been accompanied by unhappier undercurrents.

It is not so long ago that Austria’s rightwingers used to campaign on the slogan: “Vienna must not become Chicago”. They were not the only Europeans to become more xenophobic with the end of the cold war. But they were perhaps the only ones to link their detestation of the new immigrants from the Middle East and eastern Europe to hoary images of race riots and organised crime drawn from America’s bad old days.