ABSTRACT
Giovanni Arrighi claims that the ability of transnationals to suspend state sovereignty and to internalize what was once international trade has led to a global network of non-territorial, capitalist spaces. For Joshua Barkan, the corporation is "a hinge between capitalism and sovereignty" that is "articulated through a radically different spatial politics than the one associated with the sovereignty of the nation state." This chapter elaborates the spatial politics of AOL Time Warner in terms offered by Arrighi, whose work anatomizes how over many centuries European states have competed for capital that has "set itself free" from the commodity form. For Arrighi, "capitalism as a world system of accumulation and rule has developed simultaneously in the space-of-places," where "it triumphed by becoming identified with particular states," and in "the space-of-flows," where "it triumphed by not becoming identified with any particular state but by constructing world-encompassing, non-territorial business organizations".
