The Netherlands is a cooperative country. It was amongst a small group of European countries that established a broad-based cooperative movement. The first law regarding cooperatives were adopted in 1855, and the first consumer cooperative was founded in 1860. Agricultural credit co-operatives were very much structured by the late 1890s so that a co-operative union of Raiffeisen-type credit co-operatives (predecessor of the current Rabobank) had been organised. At the turn of the 20th century, credit, dairy, horticultural and marketing enterprises had been established, followed in the next decade by unions as well as co-operatives for sugar, soap and fertilizer production, insurance societies, a consumer wholesale society and a federation of housing co-operatives.
Nowadays, the Dutch co-operative movement is characterised by the diversity of its enterprises, but there are no cross-sectional cooperative organizations because of the specialization of the business activities of Dutch cooperatives (source: www.coopseurope.coop).
The total cooperative sector turnover is estimated at 85 billion € (2006 data), which corresponds to the 16% of the Dutch GDP (source: www.ica.coop).
A special aspect of Dutch co-operative developments has been the fact that it ignored the cooperative principle of political and religious neutrality, with co-operative societies organized mainly under Protestant, Catholic, Socialist and Christian Democratic ideologies.
During the last decades, many cooperatives have been created in the Netherlands, with the agricultural sector still being the dominant one in terms of enterprises and employees, while the insurance sector incorporates the highest number of members (source: www.coopseurope.coop).
Important to notice is that, in the Netherlands, in the social dialogue / industrial relations among the state, employer organizations and trade unions, the entrepreneurial form of the company does not really play a role: sectoral organizations often unite both cooperative and non-cooperative organizations – they have their field of business in common, and their organizational form is not an important aspect (source: www.coopseurope.coop; see also the first chapter about the relation between the third sector and the European Union).
