Britain’s constitutional crisis.

EARLY IN Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, the unbearable Mr. Podsnap is shown instructing an “unfortunately born” foreigner. “We Englishmen are very proud of our constitution,” Podsnap observes portentously. “It was bestowed upon us by Providence. No other Country is so favored as this Country.” “And other countries? They do how?” asks the foreigner. “They do, Sir,” replies Podsnap, “they do—I am sorry to be obliged to say it—as they do.”

Podsnap is moved to invoke a murky Providence as the source of his precious constitution, because he cannot point to any human agents or, indeed, to any specific document. Nor, of course, can his real-life countrymen today. Although England, and the rest of the United Kingdom, possesses momentous constitutional texts and significant statutes, since the 1600s there has been no systematic attempt to codify the powers and limits of the British executive and the rights of those it governs.

Dickens’s much-quoted passage feeds into a widespread view (not least in the United States) that Britain’s constitutional ordering is merely an insular oddity, something rather quaint and also comic. “Your country’s been around, what, a couple thousand years,” roared Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” “and you never got around to writing down your constitution?” But the situation is currently ironic and serious. While British ideals and practices have had a massive impact across the globe, Britain’s own constitutional status quo is now an increasingly volatile one.

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH in 2003, Edward Said penned a critique of Noah Feldman, a brilliant legal scholar who was then at New York University. Feldman had accepted an invitation from Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to help draft its interim constitution. Why, Said inquired, had it been judged necessary to entrust this task to an American who had never previously visited Iraq or practiced law anywhere in the Arab world, when “legions of Arab and Muslim legal minds ... could have done a perfectly acceptable job”?

As Said understood, there was a related anomaly evident in Iraq in the aftermath of the war. Not just Americans such as Feldman, but also British legal advisers (some of whom were Muslims) quickly descended on Baghdad to advise the Iraqis on constitutional drafting. This was not the first instance of such Anglo-American collaboration. After 1945, American and British diplomats combined to construct a new German constitution; they also bickered over the provisions of the Japanese constitution, which was enacted in 1947 and remains in force today. Divided by their unwritten and written constitutions, Britain and the United States have both nourished the view that their respective political systems and values are at once unique and simultaneously a fitting example for other societies.