Post-coup debate about how to make the nation revolves around three models or ‘discourses’. At one extreme is the ethno-nationalist vision: an antagonistic and exclusionary ethnicity affirmed by some Fijian individuals and groups against Indians, such as the Taukei Movement launched for the street marches and violence that influenced the staging of the army coups. The proponents have typically been commoners. At the other extreme, a ‘universalist’ vision of equivalence among the citizens as workers, farmers, and consumers, is held by many leaders (mainly Indians) in the labour movement, by most of the Indian religious and political groups, some churches, and by some Fijians and others in the urban middle class. Its leading political proponent, Mahendra Chaudhry, was marginalised in the negotiations for constitutional reform, and another prominent advocate, Imrana Jalal, recently lamented that ‘we still remain communities living side by side rather than with each other’ (Fiji Times, 19 June 1997:7).

The prevailing model of the nation affirms an asymmetric complementarity linked with the role of chieftainship in the management of ethnic relations. The records of the Constitutional Review Commission show that most Fijian submissions did not express an ‘antagonistic ethnicity’, but a theme of accommodation and inclusion. They stressed the idea of a complementarity based on preserving Fijian political pre-eminence in some form. Although the petition of Rabuka’s own party emphasised popular distrust of Indians and insisted on preserving taukei dominance, the Council of Chiefs declined to endorse it, and the party leaders themselves stressed that their document was a starting position from which compromise would be negotiated, as indeed it was.