Austria participated in a war.
Austria . Austria 's defeat by Prussia at the Battle of Königgrätz , during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 , cleared the way for Prussia to assert control over the rest of Germany . After the defeat of France in the 1870-1 Franco-Prussian War , Austria was excluded from the new German Empire , although in the following decades , its politics , and its foreign policy , increasingly converged with those of the Prussian-led Empire .