FLAVOR DEMOCRACY IN STRONG UNIFICATION

We show that the fermion mass spectrum may naturally be understood in terms of flavour democratic fixed points in supersymmetric theories wh ich have a large domain of attraction in the presence of ''strong unif ication''. Our approach provides an alternative to the approximate Yuk awa texture zeroes of the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism. We discuss a par ticular model based on a broken gauged SU(3)(L) X SU(3)(R) family symm etry which illustrates our approach. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. Al l rights reserved.