In Malta, we don't do anniversaries very well. Today is Remembrance Sunday. But few people here know it, unlike the British who have been reminded in the past week because they have seen everyone, from Gordon Brown on his suit lapel to Sir Alex Ferguson on his tracksuit, donning a poppy.

This simple symbol has an operative function since it raises money for families of members of the armed forces who die in today's conflicts. But it is principally commemorative because it honours the statement imprinted on most war memorials not to forget those who perished in the two world wars.

It is important to remember our triumphs, tragedies and achievements because they are woven into the fabric of our identity. But we are not just Maltese, we are also European. Not just through the Treaty of Accession that was signed in 2003 - though undoubtedly, that was a watershed moment formally recognising our political, economic and social ties with others in the continent - but also through our geography, our culture and our history.

Events in Europe have had a profound, if at times unseen, effect on our lives. The one that took place 20 years ago is one such occasion.

November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached after keeping East and West Berliners apart for 28 years. At midnight, East Germany's then Communist rulers had given permission for the gates to be opened at various crossing points, allowing hundreds of people to surge through. Anyone caught performing that act up to that moment would have been shot.

This was not a spontaneous moment, but one that had been building to a climax over several years. Several personalities made it happen.

Pope John Paul II, whose native Poland was not so much a victim of the wall as of the curtain that swept across Europe, had been a vociferous campaigner for unity. His famous statement, "Europe has two lungs, it will never breathe easily until it uses both of them", was as prophetic as it was symbolic.

Ronald Reagan was more direct. As he stood in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate (which was still closed), the then US President challenged the Soviet Union's relatively new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to "tear down this wall".

That is precisely what the last leader of the Soviet Union did, by his promise not to interfere in the affairs of the other Warsaw Pact countries, more than anything else.

However, as Mr Gorbachev wrote in an article in The New York Times last week, the fall of the wall did not happen because the then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and himself wanted it. It happened because the German people willed it. He could have added, because the people of Europe willed it. And it happened because these leaders, as well George H. Bush, were brave enough to trust one another.

It is a point of curiosity that a Maltese Prime Minister, Eddie Fenech Adami, was the first leader to walk across the felled wall during an official visit to Germany in November of that year. But it is a point of historical indelibility that Malta proved to be the country a few weeks later, on December 3, where the agreement was reached to move on from the fall of the Berlin Wall and put an end to the Cold War. That, surely, is an anniversary we must not forget.