I think what the European Union did was make Europe almost one big country. It was moving towards (but I don't think that they ever quite got there) to one single currency. So you could travel throughout Europe, do business, buy and sell things just like we do throughout the United States.

The plus side to that...is it's less expensive to do business, less accounting, no need to change currencies, less regulations about bringing goods into and out of countries.

The negative side, is less rights to individual countries to determine economic policies.

I don't know the legality of it all, but I don't believe that Great Britain's vote is automatically binding. But I will admit that I'm not sure.

Brexit is Britain opting out of the European Common Market which began in the 1970s and consisted of a group of countries imposing few or no duties on trade with one another and a common tariff on trade with other countries. Farmers and merchants could sell their products more easily as a collective and wielded more power like the United States and with their own Central Bank. Now Britain has opted to go it alone, maybe at their peril but good ole neighbor USA will be there propping them up. Britain's poor had lost jobs and the economy was not improving by the immigration that the EU was allowing to flow across borders and take jobs. Britain is very protective of their tourism and the EU was permitting porous borders causing explosions and mayhem all over Europe. The people didn't want undesirable immigration into their country.