Snake Featherston
Banned
So what? The German Empire was created because Bismarck wanted Prussia to dominate Germany which destroyed the previous order in Germany.
Prussian and Austrian domination meant two entirely different things. Prussia was ready, able, and willing to appeal to German nationalism and military brute force to sanction that nationalism, Austria was inclined to its traditional, more sophisticated means of dynastic hegemony over other dynasties.
I can say same about the Prussian annexation of Hanover and Schleswig-Holstein.
Er, no, that *is* conciliating German nationalism and blending that with Prussia's interests as a state. Annexation of those territories helped create a single Prussian state covering all of northern Germany and finally established a single strip of Prussia, as opposed to a territorially fragmented state. Austria didn't care one way or the other.
It's not that simple. The Habsburg knew they had to compromise with the German unification movements, or at least the other German states whose leadership tended to favor a closer union of German states.
No, the Habsburgs knew no such thing. What they could do, and intended to do, was appeal to the smaller dynasties to prevent the fear of Prussian hegemony meaning annexation of those smaller dynasties and absorption into some larger super-Prussia, which is what OTL Germany actually was.
Yeah, a shame the Austrian did not won this battle.
It was a closer-run thing than people realize, and even if Prussia wins earlier battles there was nothing that guaranteed victories there would translate into victories at Koniggratz, a battle that to that point was the largest in Europe since Leipizig. If the Austrians pull out a victory here, that, plus Lissa and Custoza put them in a fine position to derail both processes of territorial unification and enhance the overall standing of the Habsburg monarchy itself. Hence you see multiple dynastic states in both Germany and Italy, the survival of Napoleonic France, and an Austria that's more enduring and reversed the verdict of defeat in 1859. And in the process European political history is shaped on a very different path, one that completely butterflies away any general coalition war of the OTL model.