This article investigates the policy discourses at European level and in France, Germany and the UK during the debate on the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) post‐2013 reform. The neoliberal discourse that has provided the intellectual justification for reform during the last decade is now increasingly combined with a ‘public goods’ discourse related to the multifunctionalist discourse of the 1990s. Innovating on earlier discursive analyses of the CAP debate, this article distinguishes between discourses used during the uploading (negotiations) and the downloading (implementation) phases. In doing so it uncovers the effects of domestic‐international interactions on the application of different competing discourses. The member states' domestic legitimating discourses applied to ‘sell’ the eventual CAP agreement tend to align with existing domestic policy paradigms rather than with dominant discourses at the EU level, indicating that discourses are prone to strategic usage.