BRUSSELS (AFP) - New EU trade chief Peter Mandelson rebuffed critics who say he is too close to Tony Blair and too freemarket, trumpeting his pro-EU views and vowing to stand firm against the United States when necessary.
The former minister, who famously had to quit Blair's government twice amid scandals, said he has "moved on" from his role in British politics and pledged allegiance to the European Commission, which he is set to join next month.
He also said he would use his new powerful post at the reins of Europe's trade negotiating team to promote the interests of fair trade for poorer countries.
"Liberalisation is not an end in itself. It is a means for creating a better and a more just society, for improving people's lives," he said, adding that free trade should be a "force for good in the world.
"I am not a simplistic liberal when it comes to trade," he said.
The former British minister, who remains a confidant of the British leader, is set to replace Pascal Lamy in the key post of EU trade commissioner from November 1.
MEPs quizzing him at a three-hour confirmation hearing in the European Parliament were keen to know if he will defend Europe's traditional "social model."
"Blair is widely mistrusted in 'Old Europe', and a key question ... is whether he will stand up for the Atlanticist economic model of flexibility, free trade and forcing open new markets," said Green MEP Caroline Lucas.
Mandelson repeatedly defended the need for good ties between Europe and the United States as of fundamental importance. But he also used the opportunity to deliver some well-placed digs at the United States.
Sometimes "when people talk about their belief in free markets, what they're actually talking about is their economic self-interest and their commercial advantage," he said.
"I think that sometimes, sometimes, some of our American cousins are rather good at doing that," he said.
Mandelson also reiterated his long-held pro-European convictions and underlined that his first priority will be push for a World Trade Organization (WTO) accord, hopefully by 2006.
He said a WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong at the end of 2005 would be an important "staging post" but that he hoped the WTO talks "will be completed sometime during 2006 ... That must be our ambition."
The global trade talks stalled in September 2003 in Cancun, Mexico, but the WTO's 147-member General Council agreed to relaunch them at the start of August.
Outgoing EU trade chief Lamy has praised his successor as a "safe pair of hands".
Mandelson defended his European convictions, which he said he first brought to Brussels 25 years ago when he was active in pro-EU youth politics, and which he had maintained through the "dark days" of Britain's links with Europe.
But he was visibly put on the spot when an MEP asked where his chief allegiance now lies: to Blair, to the European Commission, or to the EU assembly to whom he has to regularly account.
"I continue to give my personal friendship and political support to ... Tony Blair," said Mandelson, credited along with Blair with transforming Britain's Labour party into New Labour and bringing it to power in 1997.
To the Parliament he offered his "fullest possible respect." But his "chief allegiance" went to incoming Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
"I've moved on from being a supporter in an active day-to-day sense of Tony Blair," he said. "I'm not a House of Commons man, I'm a European Parliament man."