Some weeks ago in Brussels, three cakes with the national flags of the EU, Albania and North Macedonia were offered during a celebratory reception after the EU Council’s Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). These cakes were supposed to mark the opening of accession negotiations for the two candidate countries. However, one of them tasted bittersweet. North Macedonia didn’t truly begin the negotiation process, as Albania did. For the first time in the history of EU enlargement, formal EU language contains a pre-process called “start of a process of opening accession negotiations”.