The Principles of European Cooperative Law is, in many ways, the culmination of a line of work that started in 2009, when Euricse (the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises) was just established and undertook its first project on comparative analysis of cooperative law in the European Union. Since then, both the current state and the evolution of cooperative law have been key elements of Euricse‘s research program, which has yielded other important publications on this topic, including, most notably, the International Handbook of Cooperative Law in 2013. Th is line of research devoted particular attention to comparative analysis of the laws that regulate cooperatives in different countries, in Europe as well as in other continents. At Euricse, we are indeed convinced that the quality of the legal framework is one of the most important conditions affecting the degree of success of any institution, including cooperative and social enterprises.

These first studies, carried out by convening and working with a growing international team of legal scholars from various European universities, highlighted the high degree of fragmentation and diversity of cooperative law in different national contexts, and started to investigate the barriers that this fragmentation poses to cooperative development and growth. The research showed that not only are cooperative laws quite different from country to country, but they often also fail to take into account the specificities of cooperative enterprises. Yet, when they do, they can be one of the most powerful tools for unlocking the potential of these enterprises and maximising their contribution to social and economic development.

After the first comparative analyses of the main European countries (and some analysis of countries outside Europe), the research group realised that the difficulty of developing coherent and fairly homogeneous legislation across countries was due in part to the lack of a sufficiently general reflection on the basic tenets of a good cooperative law, regardless of national specificities. In other words, what was lacking was the construction of an ideal set of norms that would define the identity and identify the founding characteristics of cooperative enterprises without limiting their flexibility and ability to function. Th is was the starting point of the research that led to the results presented in this book.