Many (most?) non-Scandinavians seem to assume that a supposedly egalitarian, democratic country like Sweden must be a republic, so I suppose the first point I should make is that Sweden does in fact have a royal family. The country has been a monarchy for over 1,000 years and its official name is Kungariket Sverige (or The Kingdom of Sweden in English). Like the UK, Sweden is a constitutional monarchy in which the King is Head of State with no powers and only ceremonial functions: power lies with the Head of Government, the Statsminister (Prime Minister).

I am always amused when I read or hear anti-monarchists or would-be republicans in the UK arguing that no modern, successful, democratic state can have an unelected head. My answer is, apart from the UK itself and fellow commonwealth countries Canada, Australia and New Zealand, what is non-democratic about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium? Not forgetting Spain: it is not so long since they re-introduced the monarchy as the best guarantee that the country would remain a democracy after many decades under fascist dictatorship. Some say that Greece and a number of Balkan countries might benefit by doing the same. And I am sure that Japan and Malaysia also consider themselves modern and successful. All these countries are monarchies!

The other argument these people use is cost. However, in the UK, official expenditure relating to the Queen's duties as Head of State and Head of the Commonwealth is met from public funds in exchange for the surrender by the Queen to the Government of the revenue from the Crown Estate. In the financial year to 31 March 2005 the revenue surplus from the Crown Estate paid to the Treasury amounted to £184.8 million, while Head of State expenditure for 2005-06 was only £37.4 million. And a coronation every 50 years or so is much cheaper than elections every five years.

One problem with a becoming a republic (assuming you keep the present model of the Prime Minister as Head of Government and only a ceremonial role for the President) is, who do you want as your president? The highly divisive choice of a used-to-be politician (Maggie Thatcher or Tony Blair, anyone?). Or a 'popular celebrity'? How about President Beckham? Otherwise you get an uncontroversial choice that nobody knows - at least outside their own country. No? OK then, name the President of Germany. (If you said Angela Merkel, you just proved my point).

OK, back to Sweden and its present royal family, the House of Bernadotte. What, I hear you say, are they really called Bernadotte and not Svensson? Yes, for historical reasons, they are. The present King of Sweden is Carl XVI Gustaf, who was born in 1946 and has ruled since 1973 and is the seventh king from the Bernadotte dynasty. In 1976 he married his queen, Sylvia, who is an exotic half German and half Brazilian and who he met while he was attending the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. He was the first reigning Swedish king to marry for more than 200 years, but it was important that he waited until after his coronation to marry because Sylvia was a commoner and, according to Swedish constitutional law at that time, he would have had to forfeit the throne. He succeeded his grandfather, King Gustaf VI Adolf, who was an anglophile with strong connections to the English court. He married not one, but two, English princesses. The first was Princess Margaret of Connaught, daughter of Prince Arthur, third son of Queen Victoria, who sadly died in her forties. The second was Lady Louise Mountbatten, formerly Princess Louise of Battenberg. She was the sister of Lord Louis Mountbatten and an aunt of the Duke of Edinburgh. Lady Louise later became Queen of Sweden.

I lived in Sweden during the 1970s and I remember that King Gustaf VI Adolf was a very popular and respected monarch, with a great knowledge of and recognised interest in archaeology and botany. His five children (all by Princess Margaret) managed to make the question of the succession very complicated. The oldest and heir to the throne, also called Gustaf Adolf, was killed in January 1947 when his DC-3, on a scheduled KLM flight from Holland, crashed on take-off at Copenhagen's Kastrup Airport, killing everybody on board. He was the father of the present king, who was 1 year old at the time.

The second and fifth children, both sons, disqualified themselves by marrying commoners. The third child was a girl, Ingrid, who married the Crown Prince of Denmark and was the mother of the present Queen of Denmark, Margaretha II. Only the fourth child, Bertil, protected his interests by not marrying his sweetheart, a commoner from Swansea named Lilian Davies; they just quietly lived together. Had Gustaf VI Adolf died earlier, Bertil would have been regent for the infant king, or king himself if the child had died. However, when the present king came of age, Bertil and Lilian were married. Princess Lilian is still alive and is a member of the Swedish royal family.

In some circles in Sweden in the mid 1960s there was something of a republican movement, although there was no question of doing anything while the old king was still alive. However, I seem to remember there was an attempt to take advantage of the fact that his successor was still a teenager. The suggestion was that the minimum age to succeed to the throne should be raised from 21 to 25, in the expectation that the old king would die before his grandson attained 25. The old king solved this by living to the age of 91, when the new king was 27. Also, the young crown prince was not too popular, and was widely believed to be none too bright. He was known to have mis-spelt his own name and there were rumours of fudged school examination results to allow him to graduate. Only in the 1990s was it confirmed that he suffered from dyslexia.

His marriage to Queen Sylvia, who quickly learned Swedish and settled in the country, confirmed the position of the monarchy in the country, although a new constitution removed the last of the king's powers. The royal couple have three children, and the law was changed in 1980 to allow the firstborn, regardless of sex, to succeed to the throne. The heir to the Swedish throne is now Crown Princess Victoria, who was born in 1977 and is named after her great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Ah yes, Bernadotte. Well, to cut a long story (fairly) short, in 1809 Sweden lost Finland, which had constituted the eastern half of the realm. The resentment towards King Gustav IV Adolf resulted in a coup d'état that replaced him by his uncle, the childless Karl XIII. At that time the Emperor Napoleon ruled over much of Continental Europe through a network of client kingdoms headed by his brothers. The Swedish parliament therefore decided to achieve a practical long-term solution by choosing a king who was acceptable to Napoleon. In 1810 they elected Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon's Marshals, as heir apparent. It probably helped that Bernadotte was married to Désirée Clary, and thus the brother-in-law of Joseph, Napoleon's elder brother.

As Crown Prince of Sweden, Bernadotte assumed the name Carl Johan and acted officially as Regent for the remainder of Karl XIII's reign. He also secured a forced union between Sweden and Norway in 1814. Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte reigned as King Carl XIV of Sweden and Carl III Johan of Norway from 1818 until his death in 1844. It should be noted that he took his new responsibilities as king seriously, favouring Swedish interests over those of his native France.