Agreeing the European migration pact took years. Implementing it is turning out to require something harder than agreement, which is capacity, and capacity is being built at different speeds in different countries.
The architecture rests on three assumptions: that arrivals can be screened quickly at the border, that a share of applicants can be relocated to other member states or offset by financial contributions, and that people whose claims fail can actually be returned. Italy is where all three assumptions are tested at once, because it is where a large share of the arrivals occur.
The first assumption is a staffing question. Rapid border procedures need interpreters, case workers, and legal advisers in numbers that were budgeted for but not hired, and hiring is slower than budgeting. The second is a political question that has not stopped being political simply because the mechanism exists on paper. The third depends on agreements with countries of origin that the Union negotiates collectively and applies unevenly.
Italian officials have been careful to frame the problem as sequencing rather than principle. Their argument is that solidarity mechanisms and return agreements need to be operational before accelerated border procedures scale up, because a fast decision that cannot be enforced produces the same outcome as a slow one, with more paperwork.
Brussels does not disagree in substance, and that is what makes this phase awkward. There is no dispute about the goal, only about the order of operations, and the order of operations is where a common policy either becomes real or becomes a set of national arrangements wearing a European label.