Over the last decade, cooperative businesses have displayed an ability to innovate and adapt spurred on by greater economic integration resulting from organisational adjustments within "traditional" cooperatives. Equally important has been the creation of new cooperative initiatives fostered by the social agenda of the European Union and by recognition of the social role of cooperatives have to play. The forthcoming enlargement of the EU will open up new opportunities and give rise to new demand for cooperative companies and the cooperative movement as a whole. In the immediate future, this latest enlargement will require cooperatives in the accesion countries to engage in a throroughgoing process of adaptation. From a wider perspective, however, it also represents the starting point for a new raft of major adjustements at the core of the entire EU, and these are trends that will, in all probability, extend to the accesion countries.