Czechs began to refer to their newly truncated country as “Cesko” (CHES-ko), but there was no universal agreement over how to translate that into English. (Czechia is the correct translation, the foreign ministry says.) Vaclav Havel, the writer turned president, who opposed the split, hated the name Cesko, which, aides say, reminded him of Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment; Havel said it made him feel “as if snails were crawling” over him.

Jiri Pehe, a political scientist and former Havel aide, who directs New York University’s program in Prague, applauded the proposed change. The name Czech Republic has always been viewed, he said, as a messy compromise, an uneasy accommodation of three distinct regions: Moravia in the east, Bohemia in the west, and Silesia in the northeast. The French, he noted, do not commonly call their country the French Republic, its official name.

“When I meet people from abroad, I say I am from Prague,” Mr. Pehe said. “If you say you are from the Czech Republic, people scratch their heads and ask where that is in Yugoslavia. It creates an identity crisis when people don’t know the name of your country.”

Petrit Selimi, the foreign minister of Kosovo, who helped lead the country’s rebranding after it declared independence from Serbia in 2008, noted the branding potential, saying that Czechia was easy to remember and pronounce, and would work equally well on a soccer jersey, during a diplomatic meeting or in a Facebook post.

Others, however, were less persuaded.

David Cerny, a Czech sculptor who has satirized European identity — portraying Slovakia as a Hungarian sausage and Bulgaria retooled as a Turkish toilet — called the new name misguided and “idiotic.” He said the rebranding was a cynical distraction from pressing problems like corruption and right-wing extremism.

“This whole renaming exercise is the tail wagging the dog,” he said. “The real problem these days is what is going on with the country — not with the name of the country.” He added: “The name Czechia is neither sexy nor rock ’n’ roll.”

Karel Schwarzenberg, a former foreign minister, suggested simply using the name Bohemia, which was used as early as medieval times. “Why are we avoiding the historic name Bohemia, which for centuries served as the name of our country?” a Czech news site, Aktualne, quoted him as saying. “Why do we have to do this artificially and make up names like Czechia?”