After the Austrian defeat in the Battle of Königgrätz of 1866, and the unification of what was then known as "Lesser Germany" under Prussian stewardship in 1871, the German Austrians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire felt that they had wrongly been excluded from the German nation-state, whilst other ethnicities within the Empire were tearing at its fabric.[7] Conflict between Germans and Czechs grew particularly tense in 1879, when minister-president Viscount Taaffe did not include the German-Liberal Party (German: Deutschliberale Partei) in the government of Cisleithania. This party was considered the main representative of the German-speaking middle class, and as such, the German National Movement went on to accuse the Party of not fighting for the rights of German-speakers within the Empire.