It depends on what you're talking about. The US was definitely considered as a backward racist country by the international opinion, and the civil rights movement brought more attention to it. Racial segregation in particular was seen as scandalous, even by former European colonizers which used to practice it just as well, but of course even more in the newly independent "Third World" countries. The USSR used American racism a lot in its propaganda (for instance this famous poster). Which of course brings us to the polarization of the Cold war: to many, even more than today, the US was the new "imperialist" power, bringing death and destruction to Vietnam for instance.

On social matters, however, America had been the model of youth, modernity, prosperity, and anything "cool" for quite a long time. In the 50s and early 60s, Europeans focused mostly on catching up economically. But the late-60s protests that erupted in plenty of countries saw the young people rejecting traditional society and embracing the more relaxed and liberal American culture (by that I mean the American pop and underground culture, not the traditional social order). And during those protests, even though at first young people were animated by "new" communist models like China or Yugoslavia, pretty quickly they ended up following the American protesters' model and becoming hippies, feminists, etc.

So, in a way, it was both.