Hungary in Afghanistan: A default narrative for a Particularly Prudent Public

Marton, Péter and Wagner, Péter (2014) Hungary in Afghanistan: A default narrative for a Particularly Prudent Public. In: Strategic Narratives, Public Opinion and War: Winning Domestic Support for the Afghan War. Routledge, London és New York. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper argues seeks to present and explain Hungary’s strategic communication related to the Afghanistan mission. It argues that the key communication effort revolved for several years, through changes of government and complex developments on the ground, around the denial of a directly war-related role in Afghanistan, and an accordingly formulated role conception. From this one can unpack variations of a simple narrative that was, when the occasion demanded it, largely consistently communicated to key target audiences, especially towards allies and the domestic public. Hungary played a major role in Afghanistan since October 2006, the official launch of the Hungarian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Baghlan province, up till the spring of 2013 when the PRT’s mission ended. The paper is interested in this period, and uses as its analytical framework an interactionist approach to understand processes of “role-making” and “alter-casting” as these were manifest in the generally scarce communication of the Hungarian contingent’s mission. As what was used was a default narrative which was told only in times of crises, the paper inevitably needs to focus especially on such moments. Thus the interactionist approach, focusing as it is on the interaction of senders and receivers in this context, seems to be the most fruitful potentially.

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