On February 5th, 2020, the European Commission proposed a revised enlargement methodology, officially endorsed by the Council of the European Union fifty days later. The new methodology is built on four main principles: credibility, stronger political steer, more dynamic process and predictability. Within this methodology, which aims to provide a credible accession perspective to the candidate countries, ideas of early integration into EU institutions and “phasing-in” to individual EU policies and programmes have emerged. Nonetheless, it soon became apparent that, in the absence of concrete content, this methodology failed to produce an actual meaningful change in the Western Balkans’ EU…