Germany and France had to step out and reassure everyone that their joint non-paper on EU enlargement is not the formalisation of a second-tier Union. And when the two largest member states have to explain that something "isn't" what it looks like, that usually means that to a great many people, it looks exactly like that.

The document, launched by Chancellor Merz and President Macron, is supposedly meant to speed up enlargement for the Western Balkan countries, Macedonia among them. Critics fear that instead of full membership, some kind of in-between status is on offer - a "second league" you enter but never reach the middle of the table in.

The two countries' ambassadors, Petra Drexler and Christophe le Rigoleur, rejected that reading. "Full membership remains the goal for us," they said, insisting this is about "new incentives for faster progress" and "intermediate steps", not a permanent alternative to membership. The rhetoric is carefully tailored - but the Balkans has heard these promises before, in several languages.

The context isn't encouraging. Macedonia is stuck over the demand for constitutional changes, Bulgaria is blocking, and from the domestic scene warnings are already being heard that any concession without guarantees leads to a new blockade. Antonio Milošoski sharply warned that the approach to the Bulgarian demand "must not be credulous", recalling that after the Prespa Agreement we got a veto, not the opening of negotiations.

And here is the essence no diplomat will say out loud. "Gradual approaching", "intermediate steps", "a positive cycle" - it all sounds lovely until someone asks how many steps are left to the door and whose hand holds the key. For a country that has waited at the EU's door like at a municipal counter for twenty years now, the difference between "faster membership" and "eternal approaching" isn't semantic - it's a matter of fate.