"It can't close its borders in the way that it wants," he said. "It can't have the economic policies it chooses."
3. What is the case for staying?
What is most striking about the "Remain" campaign is what it has not done: countered the arguments for leaving. Rather than defending the European Union or immigration as good for Britain, the campaign warns that leaving would be disastrous for the British economy.
Most economists agree with that claim. Europe is Britain's most important export market and its greatest source of foreign direct investment, and union membership has been crucial to establishing London as a global financial center. A British exit would jeopardize that status — and the high-paying jobs that come with it.
The mere fact of the referendum has already affected the economy; the pound is at its lowest valuation in seven years.
But it is telling that those who want to stay, including Prime Minister David Cameron and the leadership of Britain's two main political parties, have not expressed much enthusiasm for the European Union itself. Instead, their arguments are focused narrowly on British self-interest. Their message is not that membership in the bloc is an exciting opportunity so much as a basic economic necessity.
That is a sign of how unpopular the union has become throughout Britain, according Mr. Klaas, partly because of bad public relations. "If you get funding from Europe for a road, you take credit," he said. "But if you can't get funding, it's Europe's fault."
4. Why are Britons so wary of Europe?
Spend enough time in the United Kingdom, and you will hear people refer to "the Continent." Travel agency windows advertise flights and package tours "to Europe," as if it were someplace else.
As Mr. Peterson of Stanford put it, "Britain has always kept Europe at a distance, even when they were favorable to the E.U."
Britain initially refused to join the European Economic Community when it was founded in 1957. It became a member in 1973, only to have a crisis of confidence that led to a similar exit referendum two years later. (The pro-Europe campaign won that round with 67 percent of the vote.)
A strain of populist opposition to Europe remained in the decades that followed. Britain has never joined other countries in using the euro as currency, for example, or participated in the union's Schengen Area open-borders agreement.
5. O.K., so why now?
Recent challenges within the European Union have given Euroskepticism new urgency.
"There wouldn't be a referendum without the eurozone crisis, which made the E.U. look badly organized and dysfunctional," said Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based research group. "The refugee crisis hasn't helped either. It made the E.U. seem out of control."
Mr. Peterson said the deeper issue is that the union remains an unfinished project, which allowed these economic and migration crises to become so severe.
The European Union never developed centralized political institutions strong enough to manage its diverse constituent countries. Individual nations have little incentive to make sacrifices for the common good, and European unity is weakest when it is needed most.
6. What will happen to Britain if it leaves?
Projections differ significantly over the precise economic effect, but there is a consensus that leaving would hurt Britain financially, at least in the short term.
Without access to the union's open markets, Britain would probably lose trade and investment. And while the influx of migrant workers has created anxiety over British culture and identity, losing that labor force could lead to lower productivity, slower economic growth and decreased job opportunities, a study by Britain's National Institute of Economic and Social Research found.
A Brexit could also quickly spawn, err, a "Scexit." Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, has said that if Britain votes to leave the European Union, she will hold a new referendum in which Scots could vote to exit Britain — and then rejoin the union as an independent nation.
Scotland's voters rejected such a measure by nearly 10 points in 2014, but analysts say a Brexit could change that because the Scots overwhelmingly support European Union membership.
If Scotland were to leave, that could dramatically alter Britain's political character, as Scotland's members of Parliament lean to the left.
7. What are the wider ramifications?
Britain makes up about a sixth of the European Union's economy. A Brexit, Mr. Klaas said, "would be akin to California and Florida being lopped off the U.S. economy."
That destabilization could affect the United States' economy: Last week, the Federal Reserve in Washington cited the possibility of a Brexit as a reason to not raise interest rates.
There could be political consequences, as well. If Britain leaves the union, that could give momentum to the nationalistic, anti-migrant message and policies of populist, far-right parties that are already rising across Europe.
The implications for the European project itself are unclear, but that uncertainty may be the greatest threat to the union, which has helped bring Europe 70 years of peace and is already under growing strain.
It also undermines trust between member states, whose commitments seem less reliable every time one of them toys with leaving.
"Members of the eurozone will realize that things can come unstuck," Mr. Grant said. "Entropy can happen."
In his view, Germany already has too much power in the bloc, and a British exit would make that imbalance more pronounced. It would undermine the European Union's legitimacy and make it more difficult to respond to internal crises, like the Greek economy or the migrant influx, and to outside security threats, he said.
Mr. Klaas said, "A more unified Europe is a powerful counterbalance to people like Vladimir Putin."
"Putin has stayed silent on this," he said of the Russian leader. "But he's probably silently cheering the pro-Brexit side."
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